Supermicro AS-2115HV-TNRT Overclocking
Many years ago (2012) we looked at Supermicro Hyper-Speed Servers that were 2U servers supporting overclocking. Now, we have a workstation/ server that supports overclocking as well. Instead of a flashy consumer BIOS, we have a fairly standard Supermicro AMI Aptio setup, except if you look for it, there is an AMD Overclocking option that would be very easy to miss.
Clicking into that menu gets you to a disclaimer.
Once past that, there are a surprising number of overclocking options.
Here is the CPU OC settings.
There are the AMD Precision Boost Overdrive settings.
On the memory side, you can change the timing.
We ended up using this to use the V-Color DDR5-7200 ECC RDIMM kits.
Overall, that is a lot going on here but it is a way to get a few more percent out of your hardware.
Supermicro AS-2115HV-TNRT Power Consumption
When it comes to power consumption, this is a 96 core 350W TDP CPU with 4x 300W GPUs, and eight DDR5 DIMMs. That is around 1600W of components excluding NICs, SSDs, and most importantly, cooling. Supermicro has two 2kW Titanium level efficiency power supplies and options for 2.6kW and 1.6kW options.
These are important since we were in the 1800-2000W range with this configuration.
Even at idle we were in the 225-275W range. AMD’s CPUs and NVIDIA’s GPUs generally do well at idle. If you have a rack full of these configured with four GPUs, that there will be a large variance between idle and load on each system.
Final Words
The AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX is great. Paired with four GPUs and high-speed networking, this can be a great rackmounted workstation.
At this point in the review, you are probably wondering why you cannot use this as an AI server. Spending weeks with the system, I cannot tell you the answer other than that Supermicro has denser AI servers. Although this is billed as a workstation, I think it is actually a great server.
Overall, the Supermicro AS-2115HV-TNRT is a great rackmount workstation (or server) if you need a machine that can range from doing graphical tasks like rendering and video edition, engineering tasks, and even AI. There is a lot to like in this system.
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.