ASRock Rack 2U12L2S-SIENA Review 2U AMD EPYC 8004 Siena Server

ASRock Rack 2U12L2S-SIENA Power Consumption

In terms of power we get two Great Wall 800W power supplies. These are rated at 80 Plus Platinum

With drives, we were closer to a maximum of 500W when we added a 64 core CPU, memory, and a 100GbE NIC. There, of course, is room to expand the configuration beyond what we did, but the power supplies seem more than sufficient.

STH Server Spider: ASRock Rack 2U12L2S-SIENA

In the second half of 2018, we introduced the STH Server Spider as a quick reference to where a server system’s aptitude lies. Our goal is to start giving a quick visual depiction of the types of parameters that a server is targeted at.

Overall, this server is not the densest. At the same time, it provides a mix of options to handle a variety of use cases.

Final Words

Something we hear a lot is that folks do not need the density offered by modern servers. Getting 200+ cores in a server is not required in a lot of cases. One of those is for folks who simply need some backup storage. This server can offer hundreds of TB of storage in only 2U while also using lower TDP CPUs. Unlike the EPYC 4000 series, this server has PCIe I/O for faster networking, an external storage controller, or an accelerator. In fact, the top end of the EPYC 4000 series can use more power than the EPYC 8004 at 64 cores (with lowered TDP) making this solid from a power perspective as well.

Overall, this is a really neat platform. If you just need something with more memory and cores than an EPYC 4004/ 4005 or Xeon 6300 series system, and not quite as expansive as the EPYC 9000 series, then the Siena platform is great. ASRock Rack was not out to build the biggest system here. Instead, this is a great storage platform for 12 hard drives and a few other bits added. If you were less concerned about hard drive storage, and just wanted a Siena server with two M.2 drives for storage, SATA for boot, and perhaps a NIC this ASRock Rack system is very useful as well.