ASRock Rack has revealed the new W480D4U motherboard. The brand's latest offering is designed to house Intel's latest Xeon W-1200 processors. The motherboard also supports the normal 10th Generation Comet Lake parts, but you benefit more from the Xeons.
In the first place, the W480D4U is built around the LGA1200 socket, which is the basic requirement to accommodate Comet Lake chips. The micro-ATX motherboard also takes advantage of Intel's workstation-grade W480 chipset that packs features, such as Intel vPro and Intel Standard Manageability, which aren't available on the mainstream 400-series chipsets.
The W480D4U might not win any beauty pageants, but the motherboard comes with all the necessities that anyone would require from a workstation product. There are four DDR4 memory slots that support both ECC (error-correcting code) and non-ECC modules in a dual channel configuration. The memory speeds supported for ECC and non-ECC are DDR4-2933 and DDR4-2666, respectively. Independent of the type of memory, the W480D4U supports up to 128GB.
The W480D4U provides two PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots and eight SATA III ports for storage. The primary M.2 slot holds SSDs up to 110mm while the secondary slot can fit drives up to 80mm. As for the SATA III ports, seven of them adhere to the 7-pin standard while the remaining one conforms to a 9-pín design. As you would expect, the motherboard comes with support for Intel Optane memory modules and Intel Rapid Storage Technology (Intel RST), too. Expansion-wise, the W480D4U supplies you with one PCIe 3.0 x1 slot, one PCIe 3.0 x16 slot and one PCIe 3.0 x8 slot. The last two expansions slots are linked so the PCIe 3.0 x16 slot will drop to x8 when the PCIe 3.0 x8 is occupied.
Last but not least, ASRock Rack has implemented Aspeed's AST2500 BMC controller for taking care of the IPMI remote management duties on the W480D4U. Video outputs consists of a HDMI port that's powered by the processor's iGPU and a D-Sub port that's based of the AST2500.
The rear panel exposes two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports and two USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports. You can further expand USB connectivity through the motherboard's USB 3.1 Gen 1 and USB 2.0 headers. The motherboard delivers two Gigabit Ethernet ports that leverage the Intel I210 controller.
ASRock Rack didn't reveal the pricing or availability for the W480D4U.
