THIS is the Future of Storage in Servers

this one you server combines the best of u.2 2 1/2 in nvme storage but it also has edsff for e1s storage and inside there are three m.2 slots and beyond all that storage we have room for up to 256 cores 512 threads and a ton of networking in the back this is super exciting so let's get to it hey guys this is Patrick from s and this in front of me is the gigabyte R 183 is z95 now something you're going to notice real quick especially for any of the longtime St viewers out there you're going to notice that number one we're going to be doing this review on the new set now the other thing you're probably going to notice is that we have a giant moving blanket here and that is for a very simple reason I'm totally freaked out that I'm going to move this around and I'm going to like start showing you guys this and then I'm going to end up gashing this brand new workbench I'm just totally freaked out about that so for now we have a moving blanket but this server is super cool it's an AM epic powered server and it's a dual socket server so we get plenty of cores we get plenty of memory but the storage configuration and the add-on expansion configuration in this is super cool and so a quick game plan for today I'm going to show you around the outside of the server then we're going to look at the inside of the server and see how it works I'm going to show you some of the things that I really like I'm going to show you some things that maybe I'm not crazy about but are still here and before we get too far in this I just want to say a quick thank you to gigabyte for letting us borrow the server I also want to say thank you to AMD for sending us CPUs that we could use in this and I want to say thank you to kokia who sent us some e1s ssds that we're going to use in this I picked them up when I was just in Santa Clara California going and doing a tour of Levi Stadium definitely go check that out if you haven't I also want to say thank you to the St YouTube members who helped us by some of the other bits that we need for the system like memory and what have you it takes a village to do these reviews so if you can help that would be super appreciated you can join down below with that let's get to the [Music] hardware okay so the first thing I want to show you guys is the front of the server because there's a lot going on here that's different from a lot of the other servers that we see today the first thing we're going to start with is all the way over here on this side and what you'll see here is that we have a USB type a port but this type a port which is a very common front panel feature is not on one of the rack ears instead it's actually in line with the chassis I told you guys we're going to go into detail on this that's just a small detail next to that you're going to see that we have a total of eight .2 2 1/2 in Bays now one of the cool things is that if you get one of these Bays uh you know you have their trays you have foess trays which is awesome all you do is you pop in the drive like this you hear it snap and you're ready to go now having eight drives is frankly not that high of density in a one use server these days a high density just all front panel solution would be having something like 12 drives but the challenge with having 12 drives is it really restricts the airf flow back to the CPUs and so you run into like limitations on the tdps of the CPUs you run into things like you know how many bansin cards you can have and you also tend to use flimsier driv trays because they have to be compressed to a smaller footprint now we do get eight drives here but that doesn't mean that we get less density necessarily because there are another six e1s which is edsff drive base on the front of the system now one of the cool things is that this uses e1s which you can kind of think of as like a maybe a better version of an m.2 drive and you can like hot swap it all that kind of stuff you get that with e1s and that's pretty exciting now when you pull out one of these little drivet trays the first thing you're going to see is that you get this like blank which is just this like kind of piece of plastic and then you get this little tiny part up here and that's the latching mechanism so if you wanted to go and say install a drive then what you do is you would take that little latching mechanism you take this blank part off there are two screws you put the drive which we have the kokia xd6 here and you would put that on and now you're ready to go install the drive with that brings us to one of the weird things about ebsf when they were developing the spec certain large OEM vendors really wanted to make sure that they still had the ability to sell custom drive you know like latching mechanisms that they could look cool and like look and match their aesthetic and all that kind of stuff so instead of having a drive that has the attached latching mechanism instead what we get is you have this like little tiny latch that you have to screw into each Drive frankly that is a total bummer there's really not that much value in having a different latching mechanism the industry should have one and it should have been part of the spec but yet here we are because people have to have nice little tiny latching mechanisms now if you're keeping tally you'll know that we have eight 2 and 1/2 in ud2 Drive Bays plus we have six e1s edsff Drive Bays giving us a total of 14 Drive Bays on the system now you might say you know who cares about 14 drives well it may only be a little bit more in terms of the actual density at the same time having the denser Drive bays and being able to use like the larger trays and all that kind of stuff gives gigabyte the ability to have more air flow going through the front portion of the system and that gives more air flow to the CPUs sitting behind it which means that even though we have a oneu server you're going to see in our performance section that we get pretty good performance out of this one un form factor even when using higher TDP CPUs moving to the back of the system you're going to see that we have what is a symmetric or an A&B redundant style of system that means that the power supplies are on either side we also have our addin cards for things like Nicks and stuff like that you'll see those on either side and then below that the ocp Nick 3os are on the bottom side as well having this symmetric configuration allows people to build data centers that have you know like pdus on both sides for am power then also run network on both sides and by doing that you know kind of separates your A and B for redundancy right and so that's why you tend to see this kind of design now we're going to get some power consumption a little bit later but in terms of power supply we have 1.6 KW light on units these are pretty nice power supplies and they are plenty for the system now the rear. on the system is kind of interesting first we get a mini display port which is something that typically a see VGA so this is a little different some people are going to love that some people are not going to like that because uh you know things move very very slowly in Data Center and VGA is still the standard you'll also see that we have two USB 3 ports and then we have two 1 gig EET ports now you might ask why do we have 1 gig ports on a server like this the reason is that you're expecting the ocp Nick 3.0 or the expansion cards to be your high-speed networking this is really for like management so like let's say you have a hypervisor or something like that this is like your management 1 gig Nick and then you run all your data path over higher-end Nick the other thing you're going to see is that we have an out of- band Management Port this has an aeed as 2600 inside and that runs our management interface of course with the server they're using megga SPX and so you get things like HTML 5 I kvms and all that kind of stuff that you'd expect from a server like this next next we should get inside the [Music] system okay now getting inside system is super easy all you do is you push this little tab down and then you pre and then the little latch comes up now you can remove the top of the system and before we get too far this I just want to point out that you do get things like a hardware installation guide and stuff like that on the bottom of the cover it's a nice little touch that we don't see from some of the kind of lower end systems in the market okay so looking at the system uh the first thing you're going to notice is that you have another little cover here and in a lot of servers you don't have to remove this cover but in this one you actually do uh in a lot of cases so there are four screws that I already removed just cuz you don't want to see me do that and uh we could pull off this cover now I'm going to lift this up a little bit more so you can see it a little better but under here you can see that we have our e1s so our edsff Drive bays and you can see it's a little deeper actually than our your 2 and 1/2 in Drive Bays which are here the other feature that you're going to see though that is super important is that there are these eight dual fan modules now these are not hot swappable dual fan modules in instead these have little cables and instead of the cables going to the motherboard which would be on the exhaust side of the fan the cables actually run to the u.2 back plane over here so the good side of this is it's probably better for airflow on the exhaust side of the fans the kind of negative side to it is of course that if you do want to go and replace a fan you probably are going to have to undo four screws remove this front panel and then you can get in and you know actually remove these little fan connectors in a future version I wish that this was a tool of tion okay now behind the fans the next thing you're going to see is that we have these two kind of hard plastic covers and these things direct airflow to the CPU heat sinks but underneath there there are two really fun little features each side or each CPU has a m.2 SSD that sits under here now these things honestly are very easy to get to you do need a tool to be able to you know do the screw for the m.2 but pulling off the top pulling off the you know covers for the CPU like heat sink shrouds and stuff like that very easy to do so serviceability on these is fine especially for for a m.2 SSD which is super reliable anyway but that's just a cool feature right we get our 14 Drive Bays up front plus we get two more m.2 base there now I'm just going to show you guys this so that way we can kind of complete that thought there's actually one more m.2 slot over here and that's just another drive base so there are 17 SSD like spots here without having to go over here and go to the like add-in cards or anything like that to add more ssds for one you server that's quite a bit and it also allows you have like a boot drive without having to have you know one of these Drive Bay up front as something that you're going to have to you know use for a boot drive right okay now probably one of the biggest features here is of course the CPU situation so we get two AMD sp5 sockets which support AMD epic Genoa they support Genoa X and Bergamo each CPU socket has a total of 12 ddr5 dim slots in this generation you're probably going to be using ddr5 4800 however we would expect that AMD would follow Intel and you will see a faster ddr5 speeds when we get things like tour in later this year and here's a really quick look at installing a Bergamo 128 core CPU along with the CPU heat sink now of course there are different options Bergamo uses N4 C cor so you get more cores but not necessarily as much cash per core Genoa has the just general purpose zen4 cores and then you have the Genoa X which adds a ton of cash to the mix but even with the new fifth generation zon scalable Emerald Rapids Parts these still have way more cores that you can get on the Intel side and their two sockets okay now behind the CPUs you're going to see that we have these cabled connections these are mcio connectors and they provide all the pcie Gen 5 connectivity throughout the system to me there are a couple things that are interesting like number one all of the mcio connectors are on the back side A lot of times these days we'll see some of those connectors on the front side to be closer to the nvme drives but the other thing that these cable connections allow you to do is have super easy to service rear IO and like risers and stuff like that right because you have cabl you don't have those like slots that are it's kind of a pain to like get them seated properly and all that kind of stuff and so your risers when you pull them out they are super easy to go service like this now of course since we have modern processors we have so many PCI lanes for a one you system that these are pcie Gen 5 by6 risers you have a full height Riser and so you can put like high-end things like you know 400 gig Nicks and stuff like that in a system like this the other thing that's worth pointing out though is that the motherb stops here it does not stop at the end of the chassis the reason for that is that well it's a modern motherboard and something that is a challenge in modern motherboards is just pcie Gen 5 signaling now that leads us to a couple things like first that's one of the reasons that we have cabling but on the other hand when you have things like the rear IO now you can just go put those all on card so you have your ocp Nick 3.0 and they use the sff with pull tab by far the best ocp Nick 3.0 form factor because uh it's the easiest to service so that's that's my opinion but the other kind of cool thing is that this little card back here has both our aspeed BMC and it also has an Intel i350 am2 now the Intel i350 am2 is a nice Nick but it's still a 1 gig Nick but it is a you know Step Above like an Intel i218 or something like that so it's a nice Nick to actually have in here now that we've gotten through the hardware I think it's time to look at the [Music] performance okay so talking about the performance of this it is very dependent on the type of CPUs you use for example uh you could be using a bamo CPU and get up to 128 cores you can be using like a gen Geno X CPU with like 96 cores there are also lower core count options but depending on the type of family that you're putting in here or processor family you're putting in plus the skew it's a pretty wide range and so what I really wanted to see though was well what happens with this little note on the spec so going down a little bit on the spec page you're going to see that there are limits to the ctdp of the CPUs that you put in here specifically if you're running a pretty warm data center at 35° C well then you only have a 300 W ctdp limit but if you're using Lu pnck 3.0 with a TDP of 21 Watts or less and you're running your data center at 30° C or less then you can go run a 400 W TDP CPU in this no problem now the data centers that we use to actually test these things in they tend to run at 24° C plus or minus about half a degree some folks run cooler data centers a lot of folks now running a little bit warmer because you get a little bit more efficiency by not having to cool it as much but something I was interested in was really what is the performance of this versus kind of like a reference AMD epic AMD platform and all that kind of stuff that's a 2u platform but the real question I had at least in our data center was where are we going to lose Performance Based on the CPU if we you know had a high-end CPU in the system you know were we going to lose performs because it's only a oneu and it's not a 2u chassis but then there's the question of course what is the high-end CPU is a general with general purpose highend Geno X much cash or is it the Bergamo mini cores and so I thought why don't we just go put all three of them in there and when we did that we saw that generally the performance of this system was actually ever so slightly below what you would see in a 2 system during our Benchmark runs but the overall difference tended to be like maybe 1 2% which is like a benchmarking you know it's something that usually we consider just like a margin of error or just a run variation however they were consistently lower the other thing though is that all of these runs have a warm-up beforehand then there are 10 runs where we take out the top and bottom quartile to really get to that kind of middle part that we can average for these runs so you know we are actually seeing a pretty wide range or we are getting a lot of load on these systems and so seeing them consistently a little bit lower does kind of tell us that we are losing a little bit of performance but let me just kind of back up a second right if you're losing 1 or 2% performance by going from 2u to 1 U most people are going to take that any day because you might lose that one or two 2% performance but you're going to gain that by the fact that you're going to get double the density right so that's really the benefit of a system like this now in terms of power consumption I already kind of showed you that we have these 1.6 kilowatt power supplies but the overall power consumption of the system is nowhere near that really right now when we tried like lower TDP CPUs like in the 300 watsh range we were seeing about 800 watts in total system power consumption which is not too bad actually you have to remember that not only do you have the CPUs but you also have 24 dims so your 5 wats of dim so gives you about 120 watts there and then you have Cooling and all that kind of stuff SSD there's just a lot going on here so see 800 watts is not actually unreasonable for two 300 watt CPUs now when we went up to a more like you know a higher end 400 watt we did see that you know that gives you 800 watts there the fans have to spin a lot more to be able to push up air through and so we did see closer to 1 kilow on our power consumption now of course there's more room for that if you want to go put like super hot PCI cards or like ssds or something like in there you will definitely go well over 1 Kow but it just kind of give you an idea of what to expect and since somebody always asks in the comments how loud is it it's loud uh we actually ran this in the data center so we're not going to be doing like noise testing in there because there's just tons of little fan spinning but uh this is definitely a loud system there is a reason that we do not have it on on set right now because uh you wouldn't be able to hear [Music] me okay with all of these videos I like to have a key lesson learn and so I got a key lesson learn for this one the first thing is that I have to say that this is a really interesting storage configuration right we got 17 total drive Bas three m.2 Drive Bays we have six e1s Drive bays and then eight 2 and 1/2 in Drive Bays so there is a lot of mvme storage that you can put into a system like this and to me that's kind of crazy because you have all of the storage plus you have three different types of CPUs currently that you can put in there and uh you know not only types of CPS those are family so then there's SKS inside of that right and then in the back you have a ton of IO you could easily have two ocp neck 3os two expansion cards and so you could have a ton of networking on the back of this as well all a oneu platform it is just absolutely crazy to me when we think back to like the Zeon E5 v1s and stuff like that when we were reviewing those when they first came out like just to see how much bigger and how much denser the systems are even over something like if you had like a 2017 era Skylake Zeon or something like that first gen Intel Zeon scalable I mean this thing is so much denser that it's just kind almost mindblowing hey guys I hope you like this look at the gigabyte R 183 z95 this is a really cool AMD epic system and uh hopefully you like looking around if you do have other thoughts especially on the new set and all that kind of stuff feel free to go put those in comments down below if you did like this review well why don't you go share it with your friends and colleagues and also give it a like click subscribe and turn on those notifications so you can see whenever we come out with great new videos as always thanks for watching have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 131,174

Keywords: servethehome, serve the home

Id: akPfc7aouxg

Length: 17min 58sec (1078 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024