Supermicro H13SSL-N For AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" 1P Servers Review

   While it's difficult still finding Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids"
   motherboards/servers widely available at Internet
   retailers/distributors, when it comes to the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin"
   processors that launched just last month, there is better availability
   thanks in large part to leveraging the existing SP5 socket. For those
   wanting to assemble a single socket AMD EPYC 9005 series server, one of
   the readily available options in the retail channel is the Supermicro
   H13SSL-N motherboard.

   In order to facilitate more ongoing AMD EPYC 9005 series performance
   testing follow-up articles at Phoronix looking at different features
   and benchmarking new Linux kernel features, I was shopping around for
   an EPYC 9005 compatible motherboard for assembling another EPYC Turin
   test server. Plus it's always helpful having an actual retail board in
   hand for testing, in addition to the vendor reference server platform.
   The motherboard I ended up basing this secondary EPYC Turin 1P server
   on was the Supermicro H13SSL-N that I bought retail and can be found at
   a number of Internet shops.

   With the EPYC 9005 series processors retaining Socket SP5, it's
   possible for existing SP5 motherboards to receive a BIOS update to
   extend the EPYC 9004 product support to the new EPYC 9005 series.
   That's the ideal case at least of simply needing a BIOS update and your
   existing SP5 motherboard will run with the new EPYC 9005 Turin
   processors. But some motherboard models are only supporting EPYC 9005
   with a newer board revision. There is also the matter of some of the
   top-end EPYC 9005 series SKUs having a 500 Watt TDP compared to the
   EPYC 9004 series having topped out at 400 Watts. So for some existing
   motherboards they will be limited to handling only up to 400W TDP
   processors and not the 400+ Watt processors. Even so for fitting within
   400 Watt limits, beyond the EPYC 9655(P) with 96 Turin classic cores,
   there are higher core count Turin dense models at 400 Watts or less:
   the EPYC 9745 128-core, EPYC 9825 144-core, and EPYC 9845 160-core
   processors. Similarly, another consideration with EPYC 9005 comes
   support for DDR5-6000 (or DDR5-6400 in select cases) compared to
   DDR5-4800 with EPYC 9004, so there may be some support limitations
   there too. Long story short, you will want to check the motherboard
   product page / support matrix for confirming EPYC 9005 compatibility
   with existing SP5 motherboards.

   Going into this build I set out to find an EPYC 9005 compatible
   motherboard with additional requirements of supporting up to the full
   12 memory channel capability of the platform (with some of the
   lower-end EPYC 9004/9005 motherboards having support for just eight
   memory DIMMs), handling up to at least 400 Watt CPUs, and given the
   difficult ongoing state of the web ad industry (and unfortunately
   rampant ad blocker usage, etc, all combining for making operations
   difficult -- if you enjoy all my Linux hardware testing/benchmarking, a
   good reminder to join Phoronix Premium) to be as economical as
   possible.

   With those items in mind, I ended up quickly settling on the Supermicro
   H13SSL-N. There are other lower-cost motherboards like the Tyan Tomcat
   HX S8050, ASRock Rack BERGAMOD8-2L2T, and ASRock Rack GENOAD8UD-2T/X550
   but they only provide support for eight memory channels. Of course, if
   your budget allows and/or after a number of extra server platform
   features, there is no shortage of more expensive motherboard options.

   The Supermicro H13SSL-N is an ATX motherboard originally designed for
   the EPYC 9004 Genoa/Bergamo processors and has been revised to support
   the EPYC 9005 series. Board revision 2.0 (or newer) is required for the
   H13SSL-N to handle EPYC 9005 series processors and only up to 400 Watt
   TDPs. The H13SSL-N can support up to twelve channel DDR5-6000 memory
   with EPYC 9005 series processors with up to 4.5TB of DDR5-6000 memory
   in total. This EPYC 9004/9005 motherboard has eight SATA 3 ports,
   dedicated IPMI LAN port, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, three PCIe 5.0
   x16 slots, two PCIe 5.0 x8 slots, and two PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots for
   plenty of connectivity. All the basics one would expect from a 2024
   server platform.