Gigabyte R113-C10 Review a 1U AMD EPYC 4000 Series Server

Gigabyte R113-C10-AA02 Hypervisor Support

The biggest question I had for the R113-C10 was deciding what kinds of deployments this system would be suitable for. Patrick did testing with Proxmox which worked without issue, and I took it upon myself to check out both Hyper-V and VMware’s ESXi.

I built up a test environment consisting of a domain controller, an app server, and a couple of Windows 11 client VMs. I loaded everything up with some dummy data and load just to see how it all worked out. The point of this article is not to benchmark the system, but overall performance was snappy and perfectly acceptable.

ESXi was likewise not an issue, with one small note. For ESXi I would recommend installation of a hardware storage controller if you are going to populate the local drives, or a faster network controller if you are going to access an iSCSI SAN or NAS for VM storage. Regardless, the same test VMs were built and operated without difficulty.

As mentioned previously, the Proxmox VE 8 worked fine in this configuration and we tested it with up to 192GB of memory.

Gigabyte R113-C10-AA02 Deployment Scenarios

So where should you use a system based on the R113-C10-AA02? Well, that depends. The R113-C0-AA02 only offers two hot-swap 2.5″ SATA drive bays, so if you want more easily accessible storage then perhaps something like the R123-C00-AA01 would be more appropriate. These two systems are fairly similar, except the R123-C00 has four hot-swap drive bays instead of two.

With that said, if you are OK with either only two 2.5″ hot-swap bays or simply do not require hot-swap support at all, I can see the R113-C10 finding a home in several scenarios. The EPYC 4004 series offers an admirable amount of performance in an inexpensive package, so small-scale hosting operations might be well suited for this kind of system. There is an entire segment of the market that is focused solely on low cost per node servers such as the dedicated hosting market. For those types of segments, this makes a lot of sense as they also usually just need 1GbE.

Additionally, branch-office or small business deployments in general would be well served by a system such as this, which is the scenario I tried to mimic in my testing. The ability to run a local authentication server, file and print server, and some small-scale apps in an inexpensive 1U platform is pretty compelling.

I will say that the 105W TDP limit in the 1U platform is a potentially limiting factor. I recently benchmarked a Ryzen 9 9950X, which is a 170W TDP chip, in a 135W TDP limited platform, and that limit imposed a nearly 13% penalty on the CPU performance of that system. The EPYC 4564P is itself a 170W TDP part and running it at 105W could potentially curtail its performance by a decent amount.

Next, let us get to the power consumption.