Supermicro SYS-E403-14B-FRN2T Internal Hardware Overview
The top hinges up, and then one screw later, the top pops off, and you can see inside the system.
Here are the fans that cool the entire system.
You can pull the fans out to service them.
Here is a quick look at the hot swap fan connector.
You may have seen the little latch near the chassis edge and the PCIe riser. This is the latch that releases the three full-height PCIe slot riser.
Here is that riser out. You can see three PCIe Gen5 x16 slots. To feed these, there are two MCIO x8 connectors for adding lanes to the riser.
The storage configuration is interesting. There are spaces for two internal SATA SSDs, along with the two U.2 NVMe hot swap bays.
So one can get four 2.5″ drives total into this system.
Underpinning the entire platform is the Intel Xeon 6 socket.
Also, You can use either the Intel Xeon 6700E series or the 6700P/ 6500P series. It turns out that Intel’s E-core Xeons are quite popular for network and CPE applications, so that E-core support means you can get up to 144 cores in this system.
There are eight memory channels, and it is only one DIMM per channel. That limits memory capacity, but in an era of costly DDR5, perhaps that makes sense.
Cooling wise, this can handle up to 300W TDP CPUs.
Beyond the CPU, there are a few more features in this system.
First, here are the riser slots.
There are also two PCIe Gen5 x2 M.2 slots.
There are a number of MCIO connectors throughout the motherboard to feed the NVMe bays along with the PCIe slots.
Onboard there is also an ASPEED AST2600 BMC.
Next, let us see the topology of the system.
And how many ports would you like? Answer = YES!
Is there any way to determine how loud they are? A nice heavy duty machine would be a nice upgrade but for an apartment the noise is my biggest factor.
Love this, looking forward to buying a used one n a few years.
Its got a real physical SERIAL PORT!!! someone knew what the nerds and geeks need!
very nice indeed, but wondering why the hot swap fans are not rear swappable
Thanks for the review. This is a system good idea, but needs a bit more development.
a) The power cable spaghetti needs to go. This is horrible, and also impedes cooling.
b) USB Type-C for video output and keyboard/mouse
c) On board 2x SFP28
d) option to remove the normal drive and PCIE raisers, and put 4x 3.5 inch drives instead. Would be amazing. Yes, not useful for telco or some edge uses, but I would really like that.
Even better if this can be done in a half of the normal rack width – could be tricky without moving the PSUs to a different location.