Outside of the plethora of AMD-related announcements of late, GIGABYTE has announced a pair of Intel motherboards for its workstation and server board users. The GIGABYTE MU71-SU0 is designed for Intel's Xeon W-3200 processor family and is based on the C621 single-socket chipset. The other model is the GIGABYTE MD71-HB0, which is dual-socket on the C622 chipset and supports Intel's Xeon Scalable processor product stack.

MU71-SU0

Starting with the GIGABYTE MU71-SU0, the single-socket Intel C621 model has plenty of workstation features designed for use with Intel's Xeon W-3200 processors, which range from 8-core models all the way up to 28-core options. The flexible Intel C621 chipset benefits from AVX-512 support, Intel's VROC RAID key utility, and specifically with the MU71-SU0, it has an ASPEED AST2500 remote management controller.



GIGABYTE MU71-SU0 Single Socket C621 Motherboard

The GIGABYTE MU71-SUO has six full-length PCIe 3.0 x16 slots which operate at x8/x16/x8/x16/x8/x16, with a half PCIe 3.0 slot locked down to x4. This also includes a single PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot, with two Slim SAS connectors providing eight STA ports with support for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 arrays. There are eight memory slots which support both 64 GB RDIMMs and 128 GB LRDIMMs, with a maximum speed of DDR4-2933 in hex channel mode and up to 2 TB with Xeon-W 'M' high memory model processors. On the website, GIGABYTE states that the board supports Intel's Optane DCPMM modules, however we were told by Intel that Xeon W-3200 does not support it, so we are looking into this. The rear panel uses two Intel I210-AT Gigabit Ethernet controllers, an additional Ethernet port dedicated for remote management, with four USB 3.1 G1 Type ports, a D-Sub utilized by the IPMI, a serial port.

MD71-HB0

Moving onto the second of GIGABYTE's new professional mobos, the MD71-HB0, this dual-socket server model is designed for use with Intel's Xeon Scalable processor family and offers a more high-end feature set than its single-socket counterpart. The GIGABYTE MD71-HB0 shares an albeit similar PCIe slot array which supports x16/x16/x16/x8/x16/x8/x16, with five full-length slots, and two half-length. Storage options include two PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots, with three SlimSAS slots which support up to twelve SATA ports with the usual RAID options.



GIGABYTE MD71-HB0 Dual Socket C622 Motherboard

Its feature set includes twelve memory slots, with support for 64 GB RDIMMs and 128 GB LDRIMMs at speeds up to DDR4-2933. As with other C622 and C621 chipsets, this model uses hex channel memory configurations. On the rear panel is a dual-port Intel X557-AT2 10 GbE controller, with a further two Intel Gigabit Ethernet ports, with two USB 3.1 G1 Type-A ports, and a D-sub video output for the ASPEED AST2500 IPMI interface.

Both models feature similar designs with a blue PCB, blue memory slots, and standard non-reinforced PCIe slots. GIGABYTE hasn't shared any pricing or availability as of yet, but it is expected that both the GIGABYTE MD71-HB0 and MU71-SU0 should become part of GIGABYTE's other server offerings.

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