Deployed my Epyc 7402p! And it's idling at 250W...

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Jeff Robertson

Active Member
Oct 18, 2016
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Chico, CA
This Epyc build is fighting me at every corner. Fixed the LSI issue, fixed the boot loop. Everything is running fast and smooth now. It's also idling at between 225-250 watts! It's a pretty simple setup:

Supermicro H11SSL-NC motherboard
7402p CPU
4x 2933Mhz HP ram modules
4x Hitachi 800GB SSDs attached to the built in 3008 controller
Emulex 10Gbps sfp+
Windows server 2019

I've re-installed the AMD chipset drives, reset the windows power plans to default. I can switch between power plans but the difference in idle power is within about 10 watts. Any ideas? By all accounts I should be idling just over 100W. I've double checked the BIOS settings and it looks like everything is set to auto, I changed the boot mode to legacy and that's about it.
 

TXAG26

Active Member
Aug 2, 2016
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Nice build! I saw your thread about the LSI 3008 power disable item, but didn't see anything about the boot loop issue. I'm thinking about a H11SSL build, any tips to help it go smoothly?
 

Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
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It seems like we hit the lowest idle power for servers with e5v4 and in some ways scalable silver but seems while we have heaps more cpu power at our disposal the power budget has gone up again, ok if your doing a few to 1 consolidation i think but would have loved to have see the idle power the 7002 lead the way but seems not.
 

Jeff Robertson

Active Member
Oct 18, 2016
429
115
43
Chico, CA
Well so far I'm pretty happy with the H11 board, after the strangeness which is hard to actually attribute to the board itself everything has been working great. If you are going to use Windows I recommend downloading the latest ISO directly from MS, that fixed the Hyper-V boot loop issue I was having. Make sure to download the latest AMD chipset drivers as well, don't bother with those listed on the SM site. Find a newer version on asrocks or gigabytes sites, they tend to update them more often. Once you do get it up and running select the high performance power mode then follow these recommendations to get the best performance:

Super Micro Computer, Inc.. - FAQ Entry

Using those settings and a Noctua cooler (awesome BTW, aimed the wrong way but works amazingly well while being silent) I can keep it around 3.3Ghz with all cores maxed.

SM has great fan control so make sure to use ipmiutil to set the uppper/lower limits for whicever fans you use. I have 9 noctua's plugged in and they all stay quite and don't set any alerts after updating the IPMI with the right settings. You will know you need to if the fans start ramping up and down continuously. I used this thread to figure out how to do it:

How To: change sensor thresholds with IPMI using ipmiutil

I can send you the ipmiutil program if you can't find it. These are the commands I use:

Extract
Ipmiutil-3.0.1-win64.zip to the c:\windows directory

To view fans:
ipmiutil sensor -N *IPAddress* -U *uname -P *pword* -c

To set fans speeds:
ipmiutil sensor -N *IPAddress* -U *uname* -P *pword* -n *Snum* -l 200 -h 1900
Where the -l is the low threshhold and the -h is the high threshhold

Good luck if you go with the board, you may want to consider holding off if you are in no hurry as the h12 boards should be out at some point. Also, I ordered mine from Provantage and was shipped a v2.0 board.
 
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Jeff Robertson

Active Member
Oct 18, 2016
429
115
43
Chico, CA
I was hoping that the idle consumption would go down as well. No luck. I have the same idle power as my old e5-299v4 systems, maybe slightly less. I also have a xeon-e 2288g system which idles around 30 ish watts with 5 VMs running but it's not the same class of server.
 

TXAG26

Active Member
Aug 2, 2016
397
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43
Thanks for the update Jeff and confirmation that Provantage is shipping v2.0 boards. Has anyone heard anything solid on new ATX/EATX or similar format Supermicro H12 boards? It’s been almost 6 months since Epyc Rome was released and nothing about new H12 boards with PCIE 4.0 support.