SuperMicro M12SWA-TF and Threadripper!

that smell in the air it's not fresh baked cookies it is in fact the season of verizon 5000 or threader for 5000 i should say ryzen threadripper 5 000. that's what's coming i've already messed up but i've got some catching up to do because the new cpus are going to continue to work in the old wrx80 motherboard [Music] and that actually means a lot because yes you will be able to use a threadripper 5000 cpu in a threadripper 3000 wrx80 motherboard it's been almost two years and a lot of people have been really really enjoying your thread for workstations in fact it's been kind of a bizarre situation because we've seen a couple of system builders system integrators stop carrying threadripper 3000 because they were basically unobtainium presumably amd was selling all of those chips in the epic market or the chips were all so good that there weren't enough leftover chips to set you know dump into threadripper cpus or something i think it was probably supply chain in all honesty because i ordered this in february of 2021 [Laughter] what yes yes yes yes uh yeah the super micro wrx 80 motherboard this very one i had ordered from newegg in february and by august the order was cancelled and finally after quite a lot of salt on my part i was like okay the 5000 series cpus are here we're going to order this i'm catching up this is really going to be with a threadripper 3000 cpu in this case i've got a 16 core threadripper pro i'm going to probably go to gamers nexus in a month or two for a visit three month or three three three months something like that and i'm thinking about a storage server upgrade for them because oh gosh they're a little silver stone with its plucky little small number of cores and not enough pcie connectivity it's done all right the time has come this motherboard from supermicro could make a good workstation it could make a good server it could make a good station amd announced some surprises with their 5000 series cpus one of them was overclocking and so what that means is that there's actually going to be a refresh of wrx 80 motherboards so while i can use a 5000 series cpu and yi oldie super micro motherboard i am not likely to be able to use ppo or other overclocking on this motherboard i have the asus wrx80 nope doesn't seem i mean the via the asus sage wrx 80 has an overbuilt vrm i did a video on it a separate build still use it use it every day we were using it for the linux uh fsr testing for games that don't support fsr you can lie to them now thanks to glorious egg roll and his fork of proton so yay good job glorious egg roll anyway again rambling i also have the gigabyte wrx 80 motherboard gigabyte does have a refresh coming got one of those motherboards on the way so there's going to be some refresh here i know that asus has the extreme alpha motherboard i really want to do a wrx80 motherboard roundup but this is one of the older generation motherboards and on paper and in actuality it's pretty well built other than if you buy an older wrx80 motherboard i would say don't count on pbo working [Applause] super micro and their model numbers this is the mbd m12 [Music] they ask you literally everything that they don't absolutely need including fancy vrm nonsense one two three four as we can see here it's a three plus 12 vrm configuration it's modest it's designed to operate in the cpu at up to 280 watts as yet with the bios update for this board that i think has already been updated for threadripper pro 5000 on the super microwebsite as of july 1. uh it looks like this motherboard is not going to enable pbo it does support ctdp i've got a threadripper pro cpu in here that has some ctdb options you can tell it to use a little bit more power than the default and it will but it's still not going to use more than 280 80 watts but you can set those things in the bios we do have some fins on the heatsinks unfortunately the fans are pointed the wrong way for airflow like this across the motherboard except for these these are pointed correctly just not these at the front why this motherboard has six x16 pcie slots and every single one of them is 16 lanes because threadripper is absolutely bananas when it comes to pci express lanes we also have eight memory channels in eight memory slots so this thing can rock up to two terabytes of memory terabyte of memory if it's you know commodity available two terabytes is still pretty hard to come by in that that density on board we have four nvme plus two slim size breakouts for four sata plus four on board sata if onboard usb type-c which is always nice to see and a single 30-pin usb header there are two 8-pin power adapters so theoretically this motherboard could demand more than 400 watts which is what a single 8 pin can provide for its cpu and that does sound like it would promise some overclocking but unfortunately i didn't really see that i also think it's really really funny that uh there's actually a third eight pin connector here and super micro didn't bother making up new stickers because it's like oh you know do you actually need both super micro doesn't bother with pleb to your hardware it's always like the good server stuff but both eight pins required for heavy load configuration both both there's three of them this one is of course for pci express so if you have a lot of gpus here they're going to demand 75 watts through the slot and if you don't connect this then your system is going to be unstable over the years we've had several people post in the level one forums and i really have gotten to doctor house it up and i show up with this elaborate write-up and an elaborate set of symptoms and it's like this is my motherboard and here's some pictures and it's like your stability issues because you didn't plug in this weird funky little power connector on the front edge of your motherboard and they're like what what what yeah you've got two things that need a lot of power you need to plug that in oh okay i plug it in and the stability issues are gone thanks dr house the other thing i like about supermicro is they're used to building server boards so they did not skimp on the number of four pin fan headers we have four here two here two more here at the top three at the back that's going to cover you no matter what you want to do in terms of four pin fan headers we also have the system management bus for the power supply so if you want to get a server grade power supply such as those from fsp group that i've reviewed that have the system management bus header you can do that you can connect it right here to the header on the motherboard and you're good to go now this motherboard is a big chunky motherboard this is not a standard atx motherboard it is wide not tall so you don't need an 8 expansion slot case but you do need a case that will support extended atx up to the full width of this thing which is not going to be very many desktop cases super micro has also opted for a three pin chipset fan header here at the front edge i know that'll drive some of you absolutely insane some of you might not even choose to buy the motherboard because of the presence of this fan but pretty much all the other wrx 80 motherboards have a fan even the ones where pretty much the entire motherboard is heatsink so there's going to be a fan there you might just not notice it immediately at least on last gen wrx 80. maybe the new crop is going to be different but kind of doubt it this is a standard heatsink form factor so you can actually get these on ebay and elsewhere online it's not really doesn't seem to be made bespoke for this motherboard which is maybe good in terms of maintenance and future replacements again super micro has been there done that so they like to standardize on things to the nth degree the chipset fan was surprisingly loud at defaults but it was possible to use the ipmi to configure the chipset fan to run at a lower more reasonable speed for a server that's one of the oversights i've been seeing with these threadripper pro motherboards is that when you're talking about using it in a workstation capacity people care about those kind of things and i think that a better solution than this is possible so look for that on wrx 80 refresh motherboards because remember this design is from a year ago it doesn't mean it's not good it's actually really good just a minor annoyance now so there are some very important things to keep in mind about this type of motherboard if you're contemplating a workstation build you're upgrading from something and that is this has on-board remote management via the onboard a-speed 2600 controller it's got onboard vga that means you can do remote control when you leave the onboard vga the onboard remote management turned on you can remote into this thing over the network and control it supermicro has opted to do a couple of things a little different than server motherboards probably to save on costs the first is you'll notice there's two nicks back here one is based on an aquantia 10 gig chipset and the other one is based on an intel one gig chipset the intel 1gig chipset is shared with the a speed ipmi you see you can have a separate physical wired connection or your ipmi believe it or not there's a feature in the intel nix that will let it hijack the intel connection and actually share the physical nick with the operating system so there's one physical nick but this thing will work even when the computer is off for remote control in anything and that goes through the one gig port the 10 gig port is separate so even though you don't see a dedicated ipm port back here it can be remotely managed and it is the full fat full feature set of the a-speed 2600 and that's really awesome that reminds me the box does include the i o shield along with a few other accessories you got four sata cables a bunch of m.2 mounting screws which is nice because they all share one plastic bag yay super micro knows that you don't have three cpu power connectors so they include this handy little adapter that will go from gpu 12 volt power to cpu 12 volt power so plug in number three super micro got you covered good job super micro including that because even the 1200 watt power supplies don't have three cpu power connectors servers do though if you're building a server it's totally normal for a server to have a bunch more of the cpu style eps 12 volt wires the reason for that is because they'll carry 400 watts the gpu version is not guaranteed to carry 400 watts and of course you know the industry couldn't bother use eps 12 volt add to invent a new connector that's uses smaller pins and more of them because that's just how gamer stuff does it but in server land well servers for a motherboard like this this is actually a surprisingly complete accessory kit the pcb revision here is labeled 1.01 but i suspect it's even a little bit newer than 1.01 because i don't always update the uh point revision there and then of course i've got my my 3000 series not 5000 series threadripper pro cpu to install because anything else would be under embargo i don't have anything but if i did i could talk about it anyway yeah so looking look for other stuff on the channel if you're watching this in the future i'm just a fair number of peripherals on the back but you know there's nothing in terms of like heat shield or heat dissipation or anything like that you're definitely going to want to use a case that has loads of airflow my top recommendation for that is probably the fractal torrent because i've used physical actual server motherboards and the fractal torrent that have a modest uh cooling situation for their vrms because servers usually have a lot more airflow than desktop computers and the torrent did a good job with those server class motherboards even under extreme conditions dual epic processor type conditions you only got a single one here even if you're doing overclocking it's not going to use that much power so i've got a norco 4224 case here that we're going to put this in the fractal pop air xl it's not going to work in that i tried it i'm going to try it in some other cases have to do that in a future video in fact our norco 4222 you actually would be better off mounting the fan there's a fan plate in the middle of the case there's two sets of screw holes it would be better if you moved it closer to the front because you have no room at the front edge of the motherboard there's no clearance for anything so the four sata ports and your u.2 ports are blocked if you deploy this motherboard in the norco 4224 it's just not going to work well it'll work but uh yeah not great speaking of which let's talk physical installation so if you want to use this motherboard from super micro in the norco 4224 with the arctic sp34u cooler it is possible there is zero millimeters of extra clearance the standoff height of this case from the bottom of the case to the top of the standoff is 10.5 millimeters give or take uh give or take 0.1 millimeters the thickness of this motherboard to the top of the threaded pro ihs is about 12.6 millimeters and then our uh sp3 is about 152 ish millimeters tall some of the heat pipes on the top stick up just a little bit more like a millimeter or so more than the others however if it's in this case fine you can put the top on it nothing is being stressed by that it's just that there is no clearance there's no extra clearance it fits perfectly and this is a very very good cooler when we're talking about threadripper pro or epic with 280 watts of power dissipation very very good this motherboard also has the i square interface the itc interface for smart power supplies so if you like to get something like the fsp group server power supply that fits in an atx form factor that also has the isquare interface you can do that or if you're repurposing an old uh you know dual redundant server power supply or something like that you can connect the i square the system management bus to the header here and the super micro onboard management knows what to do with that it'll work fine you can also use super micro's power supplies which it probably came from well you can use super micro's chassis and power supplies and that sort of thing and it'll also plug in and be basically plug and play this is a very very good workstation class motherboard and it's also i'm sure going to be very interesting and very eye opening for super micro uh dealing with customers and end users or working with their oems who are dealing with more customers and end users that are more on the workstation side of things super micro is no stranger to making workstations that's true but with amd involved and threadripper pro and what the three 3000 series has been so far it is a little bit of a wild west because it's a game changer threader for pro is a game changer in terms of performance and the kinds of things that are available and threadripper pro 5000 really is a next generation product that has a lot of polish and lessons learned in it from prior generation products so the demand for it i think is going to be very high even given the global situation and even given everything else for people that depend on a lot of course to be productive it really does make a big difference when you have that much horsepower at your disposal threadripper pro even with overclocking maybe is not for enthusiasts i mean i'm still super enthusiastic about it because i like getting work done with it and i like for things to go fast uh i like for you know lots of pcie lanes 128 pcie lanes and i like for two terabyte memory capacities and those are nice things to have in a work section where you're using to get things done but those are probably not things that you are worried about if you are you know you're just going for the hardware bot world record very very nice oh one other thing i'll mention threadripper pro will support unregistered memory registered memory and uh registered and unregistered error correcting memory so you can do load reduced dimms and registered error correcting memory and unregistered unbuffered error correcting memory regular memory and unregistered ecc memory you're going to be limited to 256 gigabytes in capacity but the load reduced dimms registered that kind of stuff would be fine because of the nature of threadripper pro i believe and my experience is supporting people that have threadripper pro 3000 cpus over the last almost two years in the level one forum with threadripper pro systems you definitely want to try to do the qvl the qualified vendor list or the the known good list from supermicro from your motherboard vendor or at least do a little bit of research because different memory kits will be differently problematic this platform is really built for ddr4 3200 registered error correcting memory other memory will work but based on the post on the level 1 forum your mileage may vary kind of a lot but ddr4 3200 registered error correcting generally jedeck timings which is an industry standard timings generally are going to be way less problematic on this platform than anything else that said you could run 3600 on it with the 5000 series threadripper that's one of the things that is going to come in the unlocks but i don't have hands-on on that and i'm not saying that you can actually do that right now it's just a thing that's on the roadmap a thing that may actually happen a thing that may actually get you a few more points in in benchmarks but not a recommendation go for the registered air correcting memory from known good brands especially the qvl list very strong caution because this thing is going to be the thing that makes you money if you're buying a machine like this it's not to have fun it's because this is your career and livelihood and you need a fire breathing machine in order to make the suffering of what you're doing at work a little bit more palatable so threader for pro it's good at that all right i'm going to this level one i'm signing out you can find me in the level one forums have any questions or you're planning a build or whatever see it [Music] you

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 27,408

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: FA0faFGr1Vg

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 15 2022