ASRock has always been a company to offer small form factor motherboards for high-end desktop parts. Their X299-E-ITX AC is the smallest X299 motherboard available and their X399M Taichi is the smallest X399 board. ASRock has now released the mini-ITX EPC621D4I-2M which is the smallest C621 chipset motherboard.
The EPC621D4I-2M is part of the ASRock Rack Mini-ITX series of motherboards. It is quite an engineering marvel as it features the Intel LGA 3467 socket which takes up about 40% of the board and supports Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors. These include the Skylake-SP and Cascade Lake-SP parts. The socket is rated to support up to 205 Watt chips so we can exclude the Xeon W-3175X from the list, however, the rest of the 205W 28 core Xeons are fully compatible with the motherboard. You could run the Xeon W-3175X on this board, but it wouldn’t boost properly.
The motherboard has a 6-phase VRM and the power delivery components are cooled by a small heatsink with extended fins. The board gets power by a normal 24-pin ATX power connection and a 8-pin EPS connector. There are four SO-DIMM slots which can support up to 128 GB of memory with speeds up to 2666 MHz.
As far as storage goes there are two M.2 slots on the back of the motherboard and up to five SATA ports. There is a single PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot for graphics. On the rear I/O you’ll find dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB 3.0 ports, and a single VGA connector. I wouldn’t say this is an ideal board for a Xeon setup, but if you wanted to build a mini-ITX Xeon system now you can…
