ASRock Rack SORANOD8-2L2T Review A New AMD EPYC 8005 Sorano Motherboard

What happened

For Sorano, the company has released the plainly named SORANOD8-2L2T, a basic server and workstation motherboard that brings all of Sorano’s key features to bear. With up to 84 CPU cores and 96 lanes of PCIe Gen5, Sorano is a balanced EPYC offering with all of the Zen 5 architecture’s features, just in a smaller serving.

And as a replacement for AMD’s earlier EPYC 8004 “Siena” processors, Sorano is especially remarkable, as it replaces the former’s Zen 4c cores with full-fat Zen 5 cores, allowing Sorano to hit far greater performance levels. While Sorano is fully backward compatible with existing SP6 motherboards after a BIOS update, a few board manufacturers have opted to launch new boards specifically to align with the newer SP6 EPYC processor, and ASRock Rack is among them.

The “2L2T” in the name refers to the two pairs of network adapters built into the motherboard. It contains a pair of 10GbE adapters and a pair of 1GbE adapters, giving the motherboard strong network capabilities out of the box.

Key facts

• For Sorano, the company has — released: the plainly named SORANOD8-2L2T, a basic server and workstation motherboard that brings all of Sorano’s key features to bear