Question 1

Will the EP2C612D16C-4L with a pair of E5-2630 v4 support DDR4-2400, or is it limited to DDR4-2133?

Accepted Answer

You will need at least 2.0 BIOS to run v4 Xeon processors.  The ASRock website says that it will run DDR4-2400 RDIMM and DIMM modules.  However, no DIMM modules are shown on the memory Qualified Vendor List, so no guarantees.

Question 2

What BIOS version ships on this board? Will it support the Broadwell-EP out of the box, or do I need to have a Haswell-EP chip in order to flash it to support the Broadwell?

Accepted Answer

Actually I'm Perfectly qualified to answer this question as I just build a 128Gb dual xeon e5-2630V4 Xen Host. I've previously used ASRock boards and have NEVER had a bad experience with either their Boards or Tech Support. I had the same question so I pinged tech support pre-sales to figure out what to do if the board shipped with an older bios as I would not have access to an earlier xeon to reprogram it. My board from NewEgg arrived 8/31/16, put the system together and it froze during system init on a code B7, emailed support close to midnight, by time I go home from work 9/1 I had an email saying a P2.10 chip was with the shipping department (these chips are socketed, which makes replacement a breeze) it arrived 9/6 (2-3 business days over a holiday weekend)

The chip (bottom left corner with board face up I/O ports to left/SATA ports to the right) had a sticker saying P1.0 (bios version) if you receive a board with that sticker and a B7 halt during init email support explaining you've received a 1.0 BIOS, have Broadwell processors and need a P2.10 BIOS, be sure to include your mailing address it will shorten the delay. If you get the board before the processors check the sticker, you may even have the chip before the processor(s) arrive :-)

Question 3

Can you overclock the processors like you can with the single socket boards? I managed to oc an 18 core and it is sweet would love to have 2 of them oc'ed.

Accepted Answer

I didn't see anywhere in the BIOS where that is possible.  That is, I didn't see any options for changing bus speeds or multipliers.

Question 4

Does this board support NVMe boot?

Accepted Answer

Yes, I am booting from a SAMSUNG 950 PRO M.2 256GB.

Question 5

Have others experienced the same problem fitting a quality graphics card in the first x16 slot (closest to the memory)?  What works?  What doesn't?  I'm anxious to order but the whole appeal of this board is the extra PCIe lanes.  If they're not usable because I'm blocking slots with a dual-wide GPU or can't use the first slot which is dual-wide then the board is of no use.

Accepted Answer

From the User Manual for this board, PCIE 2 is a PCIE 3.0 x16 slot driven by CPU2.  Therefore, there are two remaining x16 slots (PCIE 2 & 4) not blocked by the DIMM slots as is the case with PCIE 6.

Questions & Answers