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.