Pros: While it's hard to say this board is cheap, it is among the cheaper dual socket 2011 boards out there.

Excellent board layout

16 DIMM slots is great to see on a board this size. Being able to get kind of memory installed in an E-ATX sized package while still providing this many PCI slots is great.

Cons: A few more USB ports on the rear IO would have been nice.

No onboard audio. I can't really fault the board for this as it doesn't claim to have them, but for a workstation type board this feature would have been a nice touch.

The fan speed control leaves something to be desired. Every modern motherboard I've used has provided support for controlling 3-pin fans through some sort of software. This board offers no control for 3-pin fans and runs them at 100% all of the time. Even the access to the voltage through the BIOS that third party software like Speedfan is locked so no control whatsoever can be had. While this is more of a server grade part and that "creature comfort" may not have been a high priority I would have liked to see it.

Other Thoughts: Overall I'm very satisfied with this board. I ended up just buying a separate fan controller and sound card which probably put me to a price point where I could have potentially found a board that had these features from the start...

I would however recommend this product as I've had nothing but good experiences with ASRock Rack products in the past and that trend is continuing through this board.

Pros: Very easy to setup. Motherboard layout is clean and the front panel connector was a breeze. Enough fan headers you will not run out. _All_ of the fan speeds are adjustable in BIOS.

Cons: 2nd 8-pin CPU power connector is required. Some cases might not support the SSI EEB form factor.

Other Thoughts: I was worried this motherboard would not work in my computer case. I was wrong. It's an In-win Dragon Driver full tower case, Extended ATX compatible. And guess what, the various holes for SSI EEB were already pre-drilled. Yes you read that I didn't have to make _any_ modifications to install this motherboard in my EATX computer case. Installing it was a breeze but holey cow it is massive at 12x13 inches. Since power supply only has one 8-pin 12v cpu connector the computer boots up just fine but without the 2nd Xeon. It's an older 650 W Thermaltake that I bought seriously about 5 years ago so its time to upgrade anyway. The manual for this motherboard says it is compatible with the 20 or 24 pin ATX power supply and will work with either the 4 pin or 8 pin 12V cpu connector. Sorry I can't tell you which power supply to use just yet because I'm still researching. The heatsinks I'm using are Cooler Master Evo 212's on the 2 Xeon 2670 V1 processors. Keeps 'em nice and cool. I'm very happy with the 4 extra SATA3 6gb ports on a secondary controller in addition to the 2 ports you get from the 602 chipset. As my RAID array is currently rebuilding at 150 MiB per second, I ran benchmarks on my Samsung Evo SSD. Sequential Read: 506 Sequential Write: 526 Random Read (IOPS) 51349 Random Write (IOPS) 46685. It will be much faster once I enable Samsung Rapid Mode. And finally, the cherry on the ice cream: I didn't have to reinstall my operating system. My Windows 10 installation just seamlessly transitioned to the new motherboard as if I had never even changed it. It was that smooth. I have not installed a single driver and I probably won't need to. Best upgrade evaAR!

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Daniel,

Thank you for purchase and review. You can split open the EPS 4-pin 12v connector into two (if separable) and use both 4-pin ends to connect to each of the EPS 8-pin power header of the CPU socket BSP1 and AP1. But this is still not entirely safe if the CPUs will be under heavy load. The PSU we use on our bench, for example, is CoolerMaster V850, which features two EPS 8-pin 12v power headers. This board in specific is using Square ILM heatsink form factor. More variety in Dynatron’s website.

If you have any technical inquiry in the future, please contact me at william@asrockamerica.com

Thank you

ASRock Rack Support
Email: http://event.asrock.com/tsd.asp?ln=en

Pros: 14 onboard SATA ports (check the picture, its really cool) , 4 onboard gigabit nics, 16 ram slots... this thing is loaded
Setup was a breeze (dual Xeons, 64gb of ram and every pci slot was full)
Plenty of room between CPU's for a large fan, I used 2 Nactua setups that were a large heat sync and a total of 4 fans (2 per CPU)
That brings me to my next point, there are a TON of fan headers on this board, I have 4 cpu fans and 4 case fans all connected directly to the mb

Cons: only 2 external usb ports (no big deal, usb cards a re cheap)
this board takes forever to post and always reboots twice (IE you turn it on, it posts, gets to where windows should start, re-boots and starts up... Its very odd but not uncommon for server boards from what Ive read, just be patient and watch the error codes when installing new hardware, new additions will add to the post time on their first power up after installed)

Other Thoughts: This board replaced an ASUS board I bought, the ASUS board wouldnt play well with any of the available vid cards I had. A biuld on this scale allways takes a bit more time but I honestly am grateful that the ASUS board wouldnt work becasue it brought me to this board which is better in so many ways (IE more SATA ports, more ram slots, more total ram capacity)

Pros: Absolutely none.

Cons: First of all, looked like I was sold a used board. The packaging seemed off. Everything was there though and I got over this quick due to the cost of the board and its features. Finished building my new server yesterday and was excited about my new MB. Booted up and first thing I noticed is that it was not seeing CPU #2. (Intel dual E5-2609s) Said not present. Troubleshooting today, so I pulled it to make sure no pins were bent. All good. Put it back in place and still no go. Swapped CPUs and the same thing. CPU#1 that was working in socket 1 was now not working. Tried calling ASROCK support but just kept getting passed back and forth via robo prompt. Im assuming they're closed for Christmas but no message indicating so.
I've already spent most of my Christmas dealing with this MB so Im calling it quits and will give them a call tomorrow.
Never had issues when buying Gigabyte, ASUS or Supermicro boards, so as of today, I would not recommend a ASROCK MB. Especially this one. Would love for ASROCK to prove me wrong though. We'll see how tomorrow goes.


-Does not see CPU
-CPU sockets don't line up all that great.
-Board looks refurb. May not be ASROCK fault

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Derrick,

ASRock Rack conducted an expedited RMA service to replace your unit. Replacement unit is brand new as well as your original one, and it has been fully tested to ensure both CPU sockets can detect dual CPU configuration.” Also, the returned unit has been found with a broken locking latch on memory slot A1. We are crossing our fingers the replacement unit will be fine with you.

If you have any technical inquiry, please contact me with detail problem description at william@asrockamerica.com
I will assist you shortly.

Thank you

ASRock Rack Support
Email: http://event.asrock.com/tsd.asp?ln=en

Pros: tons of memory slots.
Using KVR16R11D4/16 , 4 sticks. Going to get more....
dual XEON E5 2660 2.2.Using for ESXI home lab.
Amazing tech support. William from ASRock went above and beyond
helping me to set it up.

Cons: none

Pros: space for lots of ram and drives. dual socks. Supports a wide range of hardware

Cons: two of the mounting screws are located under the tabs for the ram. It is very difficult to tighten these screws. Especially in a tight case

Other Thoughts: Ensure your case can fit this. ITs a large motherboard. NOT E-ATX but SSI-EBB

Pros: Worked with ES chips right out of the box
16 RAM slots
Tons of slots for SATA drives
Rock solid
Great value, much $$ / feature than the competitors

Cons: One bad RAM slot

Other Thoughts: I have this board set up w/ 128 gb of ECC registered ram (8 16 gb modules), two ES V2 chips, and a bunch of SSDs and physical drives. My OS is Fedora 20. It's running like a champ- the most stable board I have out of 15 in the cabinet. The only issue I have is one of the RAM slots doesn't work... but aside from that I couldn't be more pleased after about 5 months of uptime. Customer service is also top notch. I also own the X9DAi (it's ok) and have returned a couple of the ASUS boards. This one is by far the best, and we will be buying more.

Pros: I built this with a NORCO 24 drive case with 3x 6tb drives and 3x 4tb drive. Installing freenas went on without a hitch no weird driver issues or crashing. Performance is pretty good. CIFS share transfer maxes out the 1gig nic card with Plex and owncloud jails running in the background. With an average 15% CPU usage on a Xeon E5-2620 and 32GB ECC ram.

Cons: Only real compliant are the instruction are that great but if your a techy person you can figure it out.

Other Thoughts: If you want a monster FREENAS box this is the way to go.

Pros: Ok, so after reading the above reviews I was nervous about buying this board. But I am very happy I did. I had an old supermicro mobo with 4gb of ddr2 ram running an esxi server. I bought this as a replacement. I dropped the board in and it booted esxi right up and never even stuttered (with the exception the networking in esxi was messed up but that was to be expected). This board runs amazing with 32gb of PNY DDR3 ram at 1600Mhz, Intel Xeon E5-2620 v2, lsi 9260-4i, intel sas expander, intel quad port nic, and a Noctua NH-U9DXi4. It runs 3 vm's (until I get another processor and another 32gb of ram) without question. These servers are a Windows 2012 server running vcenter, Ubuntu server for owncloud, and a media server for on the fly transcoding and streaming movies.

Cons: ABSOLUTELY NONE!

Other Thoughts: It took me under 20 min to install the processor, rip the old supermicro board out, drop this in, and get it to boot esxi the first time it was powered on.

Pros: I'm using it as a virtualization / storage server machine with a Xeon E5 and 20 hard drives through a LSI SAS HBA. Arch Linux with ZFS for the drives.

This board runs like a champ.

Cons: PWM fan speed can't be read or controlled from Linux. It uses some weird chip that lm_sensors and speedfan don't support.

Other Thoughts: Haven't used the IPMI feature, so I can't speak to that.
Also only using it with one CPU for now, the 2nd socket is to future-proof this server; I'll add the 2nd CPU later.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear ASRock Customer

Thank you for your purchase and review.
Please download and update the latest BIOS and BMC at link below.
Click Download, and then click BIOS.
http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=EP2C602-4L/D16#Download

If you have any technical inquiry, please contact us with detail problem description at william@asrockamerica.com. We will assist you shortly.

Thank you

ASRock SUPPORT
Tech Support Email: http://event.asrock.com/tsd.asp?ln=en