Supermicro AS-2115HV-TNRT Internal Hardware Overview
Looking inside the system, we are going to start from front to back here.
Starting off, we have a set of six fan modules providing the massive cooling needed by this system.
We have seen this chassis with four fan modules, so this is a bit different.
Behidn the fans is an airflow guide.
Usually, I am not a fan of these flexible airflow guides because they are harder to seat properly. Still, this one was relatively easy to fit and stayed in place.
Underneath, we get the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro LGA4844 socket and DDR5 memory.
The AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX headlines the lineup that goes in this system with 96 cores and 192 threads.
There are also eight DDR5 memory slots for eight channel memory in 1DPC configuration. We also get ECC RDIMM memory support. While this is a workstation platform, make no mistake, this platform has AMD EPYC server heritage. Something else neat, that we will cover later is that this allows for overclocking.
Something that might have caught attention of our readers is that the motherboard has vast expanses of green PCB without components placed on it. On the right side there are MCIO connections for PCIe Gen5 on the front, and power supply inputs with the GPU power connectors on the rear. There is not a lot between those.
On the other side, we get slightly more. Here is the WRX90 chipset, and both front MCIO and rear power connections. There is, however, one other neat feature.
That cool feature is the two M.2 slots sitting on this side of the motherboard.
Those sit just in front of the GPU power headers and riser slot.
We already showed the risers in the external overview, but four double-width GPUs and an additional NIC would even be a lot for a standard tower workstation. Perhaps this is the reason the fans are so dense even on the single socket platform. The power density at the rear of the system is very high compared to the front half.
A small feature, but a nice one is the blue tabs to pop out the risers. A decade ago, we would not expect these on high-end Supermicro servers, but now they are even found in this type of platform.
Even though this is a workstation, there is an ASPEED AST2600 BMC for management, just like a standard server.
Here is the AIOM extension cable and slot. The various metal bits around this are there for Supermicro’s Hyper servers that can have two of these AIOM slots stacked at the rear.
Also fun here is that there is a fan holder spot as well as the retention bar for two M.2 SSDs that is used in the Supermicro Hyper platforms.
As a single socket motherboard with only 1 DIMM per channel and 8 channel memory, there is a lot of extra room in the chassis.
Next, let us get to the block diagram and topology.
I think what differentiates a workstation and a server is that you would work at a workstation and work at a distance from a server; partly because of a 1U server’s 40mm fan cacophony and partly because of the lack of audio or numerous USB ports. Also a workstation case would be at least somewhat attractive (not that all 1U servers are plain or ugly) and probably at least 3U so it didn’t topple over.
Some of that was covered in the STH articles: “Supermicro AS-5014A-TT AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro Workstation Review” and “Gigabyte MC62-G40 AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro Motherboard Review”.
I used a couple of Dell PowerEdge R720 servers as workstations for many years. Not too surprising as you can buy workstation variants of them with much the same inside.
Biggest difference I’ve found is that servers tend to have a lot more remote management capability (e.g. remotely accessing the BIOS setup, installing an OS remotely), as well as significantly longer boot times (around 15 minutes in the case of the PowerEdge). They also tend to be stricter with the PCIe cards they accept – I never had much success getting consumer USB 3.0 support on the PowerEdge, it kept failing with PCIe training errors during boot when the cards were present and I tried a couple of different types. Yet higher end cards like NVMe SSDs were fine.
But at the end of the day they are all PCs inside so they can be used for whatever purpose you want.
My biggest question is that as Supermicro doesn’t seem so popular here in Australia, how are they with support and warranty? Most people here are either Dell or HP because of their next-day support models, but I know nothing about Supermicro in that respect.
Threadripper 7995WX costs three times more than similar EPYC 9654(P). In the rack server EPYC seems more appropriate (and 12 memory channels give the advantage).
Doesn’t the 7995WX boost to 5.1GHz while the EPYC 9654 caps at 3.7GHz? For lightly threaded workloads the performance difference is substantial: I wouldn’t compare them.
I do not see any mention of noise. Is this usable in a quiet office?
In order to be a workstation, I’d expect it to at least have a tower conversion kit (the way some HP Itanic servers had). That, and also be quiet (which is hard at 2U and 4 GPUs)
This would be great for gaming lol, put it in the basement, For audio i guess you can use a sound card.
@Kanaro If you mean playing games in the basement sure, but if you want to run cables up to another room, it’s surprisingly difficult. I put my machine in a rack and used three metre cables to connect it up to my desk and had so many problems even at this short distance, that I after a few years of messing about I gave up and went back to a couple of PCs sitting on my desk.
For one, DisplayPort tops out at around five metres (especially at 4K@60Hz), and at this length random electrical noise often causes the picture to drop out for a few seconds at random intervals. It’s annoying having the screen go black for five seconds when watching a movie, but I imagine it would be even more annoying in the middle of a game.
USB also tops out at around three metres, and to go beyond this you need amplified cables which aren’t especially reliable. One basic keyboard I had would randomly disconnect and reconnect causing lost keystrokes, and my main backlit keyboard wouldn’t work at all due to the voltage drop across a five metre active cable, until I added a 5V power injector at the device end of the cable. Using USB sticks was an absolute pain, as even though I connected them via a powered hub, I found many of the files I was writing became silently corrupted.
After that experience I definitely wouldn’t recommend locating your machine more than 1-2 metres away from all your peripherals. It’s not worth the effort or expense trying to get everything working properly.
The real difference between workstation and server is OS support. Does Windows have drivers for this machine if you run Windows 11? Or driver support for Windows Server? This matters maybe not to the homelabber, but it matters in the enterprise world when talking about support, maintenance, security, etc.