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Motherboard manufacturers Asus and ASRock have begun building custom workstation boards for some enterprise customers that offer a unique feature—a CPU socket that’s rotated 90 degrees. The rotated design allows for elongated heatsinks in a server environment where cool air is funneled over the CPU, memory, and VRMs. It’s reminiscent of Intel’s ill-fated BTX form factor from way back. The new motherboards were discovered by German overclocker de8auer on a recent tour of cloud server company Hetzner.
In the video, he says Hetzner invited him to its data center to show off some of its newest AM5 boards, which turned out to be the Asus Pro WS B665-ACE and the Asrock Rack B665 D4U1L. Both boards are notably bereft of features and look relatively barren. Even the chipset has just a tiny, cheap heatsink on it. These are custom boards made for budget-minded customers, as cloud hosting providers order thousands of them simultaneously. The CPU socket is rotated, and so are the rest of the components surrounding it, including the memory slots and the VRMs. This creates an efficient horizontal channel for airflow to cool all of the parts at the same time. It also allows for a much longer heatsink, which testing shows can reduce temps by up to 3C.
The most significant difference between these budget workstation boards and regular AM5 boards is they are PCIe 4.0 only. No compatible SSDs exist yet, so they don’t need that level of connectivity today. Relocating the VRMs does introduce a “barrier” below the CPU socket, though, requiring the PCIe lanes to be rerouted around them and down to the first PCI Express slot. In the video, the Asus board is running a Ryzen 7 7700 non-X CPU, which is a 65W part, along with 64GB of DDR5 4800MHz. These CPUs are a good fit for a server environment, according to de8auer, due to their lower power consumption. He notes they only give up about 5% performance at 90W compared with an unlocked AM5 CPU while consuming 20-30% less power.
The ASRock board features a unique placement of the VRMs as they are the last thing air glides over before being sucked out of the chassis.
Credit: de8auer
The video also showcases an ASRock board, which is even more barren than the Asus mobo. It also has a rotated upper half, but with VRMs on the right side of the CPU instead of wrapping around it in an L-shape. This helps cooling, as they are directly in the airflow path—which goes left to right. This is backward from a typical ATX chassis but more suited to a rack environment.
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