Onboard we get a PCIe Gen3 x8 slot and a x16 slot. That x16 slot’s lanes are shared with the MiniSAS HD and one of the Oculink connectors. There are four PCIe Oculink connectors for U.2 NVMe and one for 4x SATA devices (the SATA one is shared with the x16 slot.) Using a M.2 SSD is possible but one can also break that out to 4x SATA ports. That means one can get a total of 4x U.2 NVMe SSD ports a PCIe Gen3 x8 slot, and 12x onboard SAS ports albeit using a plethora of cabling options to get the SATA lanes out.

Storage does not stop with the SATA and PCIe lanes though. There is also an embedded Broadcom / LSI SAS3008 controller onboard which means we get 8x SAS3/ SATA III ports as well.

On the networking side, we get a lot. There is an out-of-band management port for the board. We also have two 1GbE ports via two Intel i210 controllers. There are two 10Gbase-T ports via an Intel X710-AT2. Finally, we get two SFP+ ports from the AMD EPYC 3000 series onboard MAC. The Intel NIC will have more features, but this is one of the first motherboards we have seen that uses the AMD EPYC 3000 series embedded MAC.