Today I am looking at the Supermicro H13SAE-MF motherboard. This is third in a series of reviews focusing on EPYC 4000, and is somewhat overdue as I have already deployed several of these H13SAE-MF boards. Nevertheless, it is never too late to do the work, so let us see what this board has to offer.
Supermicro H13SAE-MF Overview
The Supermicro H13SAE-MF is a mATX motherboard measuring 9.6″ x 9.6″ and powered by AMD’s B650 chipset.
One thing you might immediately note as a contrast to a consumer desktop mATX AM5 motherboard is that the CPU socket and memory slots are rotated 90 degrees. This is done to align the H13SAE-MF for front-to-back airflow when installed in a rackmount server, and all of the heatsinks and components on this board are positioned to allow air to flow in that direction.
The CPU socket is AM5, and supports all of AMD’s AM5 CPU offerings from Ryzen 7000, 8000, 9000, and the EPYC 4004 series of chips at up to a 170W TDP. I have personally deployed both Ryzen 7000 series and EPYC 4004 series chips using this board and had no issues.
Official memory support is for 4x DDR5-5200 UDIMMs, up to 192GB total capacity, with or without ECC. There are now 64GB DDR5 UDIMMs and I suspect they might work, but I have not tested that yet.
PCIe connectivity is relatively robust, with a pair of PCIe Gen5 x16 slots that are electrically x16/x0 or x8/x8 directly to the CPU. The top x4 PCIe slot is Gen4 and driven by the chipset. Storage support begins with a pair of M.2 PCIe Gen5 x4 slots, both of which are directly connected to the CPU lanes.
Additional storage support is provided by four SATA ports. SATA DOMs have fallen out of fashion, but it should be noted that none of the SATA ports are configured for power delivery and thus do not support SATA DOMs natively.
Rear I/O is, in a word, robust. The H13SAE-MF seems to straddle the line between a workstation and server motherboard, and the rear I/O reflects that. The VGA header is connected to the BMC’s video output, while the DisplayPort and HDMI connections are wired to the CPU’s built-in iGPU. Audio headers are present, which is a distinctly workstation feature, and the USB output is downright luxurious in comparison to any server I have ever seen with a trio of both type A and type C outputs. Even more luxuriously is that all the type A ports are 10Gbps, and the right-most type C port is 20Gbps, so external USB connectivity is very good. Rounding out the rear I/O is a COM port and a trio of gigabit NICs. There are two Intel i210 1GbE interfaces for the system and a dedicated NIC for the BMC.
Next, let us get to the block diagram.
Supermicro puts some usefull BMC-features behind a paywall.
Other company are much more better in this area, and this should be mentioned in a test.
How is bifurcation of the second x16 pcie slot? I have heard you can’t set it to x4x4 when using the first x16 slot for GPU (@x8) or vice versa – not sure if newer BIOS fix this issue – x8x4x4/x4x4x8 is pretty well supported on amd MB’s normally so sad to hear Supermicro gimped this board
Would be good if the review mentioned these limitations
The Epyc 4004 series also works with pfSense.
@Stuart I think that is a CPU limitation rather than a board limitation. As far as I know, the AM5 chips can’t bifurcate less than x8/x8 so it would be the same on all boards.
Chris S and Stuart,
I’m not sure. I know older AM4 boards could do x4/x4/x4/x4 bifurcation on the x16 slot, but it isn’t something I’ve looked into on AM5. I don’t have one of these boards on hand at the moment, but the next time I lay hands on one I’ll try to investigate and update!
AM5 has no problem doing x4/x4/x4/x4 bifurcation. However it’s requires motherboard vendor support. For example search for ASUS FAQ number 1037507 for a list of their boards capable of it.
AM5 can definitely do x4/x4/x4/x4. I have a 9900X on an Asus Tuf x670E board that does it.
It’s infuriating that AMD still has not released Windows Server 2025 drivers for the Ryzen AM5 onboard GPU. The installer actively blocks you from installing the Windows 11 or Windows Server 2022 drivers, which would work just fine.
Pete,
The installer blocks you, but the driver is just fine. When you run the installer it extracts the driver itself to \AMD\AMD-Software-Installer\Packages\Drivers\Display\WT6A_INF, and you can just update the driver via Device Manager and skip the installer. Works just fine. As seen here: https://imgur.com/kBzbVB1.png