Supermicro AS-2115HV-TNRT Block Diagram and Topology
Here is the block diagram for this system:
Something you notice right away is that there is not a lot going on with the WRX90 chipset. This feels a lot like it could do without the chipset.
Here is the system setup with the 96 core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX, 512GB of RAM, the dual port Broadcom 100GbE NIC, and the four NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPUs.
This is certainly a big workstation platform. Some look at these 2U workstations and assume that you instead need a 3U-5U converted tower workstation to get a lot of density. That is not the case here. We have a lot of components in this system and the picture could have been even more full with more storage devices installed.
Supermicro AS-2115HV-TNRT Management
The workstation/ server uses an ASPEED AST2600 BMC for its out-of-band IPMI management functions.
In the interest of brevity, the Supermicro IPMI/ Redfish web management interface is what we would expect from a Supermicro server at this point.
Of course, there are features like the HTML5 iKVM as we would expect, along with a randomized password. You can learn more about why this is required so the old ADMIN/ ADMIN credentials will not work in Why Your Favorite Default Passwords Are Changing.
Next, let us talk about performance.
Supermicro AS-2115HV-TNRT Performance
The AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX is currently the top workstation CPU with 96 cores and 192 threads.
When we tested this, we wanted to see how it compared to a standard workstation. Putting the CPU into a server chassis ideally would not have any negative impact.
What we saw here was exactly what we would want. Performance was within the margin of error. Even with a smaller looking heatsink, a single 350W TDP CPU is not a notable task to cool in a 2U server chassis these days.
Something we also tried was doing a bit of memory overclocking using the V-Color DDR5-7200 ECC RDIMMs. We saw some decent results here just by using the higher speed memory.
The next question was whether the system could handle the four NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPUs.
We just ran through a few of our GPU workloads for both rendering in Windows and AI in Ubuntu Linux:
Overall, it seems like the four GPUs are each being well cooled as they are within test variation margins to the single GPU baseline Threadripper Pro workstation. Next, let us get to the overclocking.
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.