AsRock Rack 1U4LW-X470 1U Rackmount Server Barebone AMD AM4 Ryzen & Ryzen 7nm PGA1331 X470 4 x 3.5″ HDD 400W PSU

Pros: – comes with a CPU heatsink (part #ART13G074173000AK08SE01S), which doesn’t seem to be available separately as of this review Cons: – none of the fans are hotswappable; they’re all plugged directly into the motherboard and the leads are zip-tied together. if one of the fans failed, you’d have to power the box down, cut zip ties, etc.–a lengthy process.
– speaking of fans, the power leads to the fans come out the rear blocking a little bit of the airflow. in the front, all the sata and power cables for the front drives run right in front of the fans, so airflow is impeded by design.
– pci-e expansion is limited to a single slot card of about 6.5″ in length. it could technically be longer, except that the motherboard’s front panel and auxiliary connectors protrude up about 4mm too high to be able to fit a single slot card over them. they should have made these pins come out the side instead of straight up.
– the airshrouds that are provided don’t quite fit right and are really finnicky. they interfere with the sata ports near the front mid-right of the board, requiring you to trim the shrouds to fit better.
– the steel they used for the cover is just a tiny bit too thin, such that the cover warps a little when it’s not on, and that makes putting the cover back on a bit finnicky. they also put a couple of buttons on the lid to allow you to unlatch it and slide it off without tools, except that there’s a single screw on the back still–so that’s a weird combination of tool-less and not..
– no intrusion detection. the motherboard appears to have support for this, but the chassis doesn’t.
– ASRock support is awful. they have a single guy in the US, and if he’s out to lunch or on vacation, you’re stuck waiting. it also doesn’t help that he’s got a bit of an attitude–talking about you, William. Overall Review: Given the flaws I can see in the first hour of dealing with this, I can’t imagine anyone in IT thinking: “Oh yeah, I’d like to deploy 1000 of these things and support them.” It would be a nightmare.
Unfortunately, ASRock seems to be the only manufacturer of rack/server equipment for AMD’s Ryzen AM4 processors, so there’s no other choice.

Pros: -CPU stays cool
-IPMI works great
-Easy to load up lots of storage or SSDs
-Quiet by default (I have mine set at higher fan curve by default since in a datacenter and not worried about noise.)
-Works with ECC memory (I have 128GB (4 x Samsung 3200mhz Unbuffered ECC), make sure to change bios settings if you want to enable the ECC, you can run the command “wmic MemPhysical get MemoryErrorCorrection” in Windows to verify ECC is working)
-Easy to add 10gig NIC in PCIe slot.
-Rails included Cons: -CPU cooling shroud can be a bit of a pain to install.
-Wire routing could be better in server to not block as much airflow. Doesn’t really seem to be an issue though as CPU stays cool (I’m running 5950X in these servers)
-Can’t seem to figure out how to restrict IPMI to only whitelisted IPs so for now I have on a private out of band network. When I enable the IP restrictions I’ve managed to block all IPs and had to reset the IPMI. Overall Review: These are great little 1U servers. I have 3 of these servers in my colocated 1/4 rack running Server 2022 with Hyper-V. These would be great home lab servers too as they are quiet when at idle. I switched from multiple Dell Poweredge R630 servers to these and having faster single core performance made a huge difference in the response time of the websites I’m hosting.