Review request: Supermicro H13SAE-MF motherboard

[Crote]

I learned of this board through Phoronix's EPYC 4004 review, but I think it might be especially suitable for the STH audience too. It's superficially similar to the board covered in your own 4004 review, but there are some key differences here:

• It's available separately, in a convenient micro-ATX form factor
• Its PCI-E Gen5 x16 slot can be split into two Gen5 x8 slots
• It has an additional PCI-E Gen4 x4 slot
• It has two Gen5 M.2 slots
• It has the regular IPMI stuff one would expect from a server, but...
• ... It also has a full set of "desktop"-style IO, with analog audio, 3x USB-C, and 3x USB-A!

In my opinion, this essentially makes it the ideal board for affordable workstations, and probably a lot of DIY servers too.

Want to create a hybrid storage server? Put two SSDs in the M.2 slots, add a 100G NIC in one of the x8 slots, and plug four drives into the onboard SATA ports. Complete the build with a PCI-E-to-M.2 converter to add two additional SSDs in the other x8 slot, and throw an HBA into the x4 slot for even more drives.

Want to create a workstation? Put a GPU into one of the x8 slots (it's Gen5, you're probably not losing any performance), put a 40G NIC into the x4 slot, and you've still got an entire x8 slot left for expansion. And you've still got all the regular i/o ports you want on a desktop!

Here are some things I'd like to hear about in a review myself:

1. Do the x8 slots support bifurcation? Many desktop motherboards can do x8x8, x8x4x4, and x4x4x4x4 so the chipset can do it, but does this motherboard have the BIOS support for it? It'd open up a lot of possibilities when it comes to adding extra M.2 SSDs.
2. How does the performance compare to desktop motherboards & CPUs? Desktop and workstation boards have significantly beefier VRMs, are those just for decoration or does a more bare-bones board like this compromise on performance?
3. How do modern GPUs handle Gen5x8 speeds? Is it a bottleneck? Do you lose a lot of performance by bifurcating that x16 slot?

 

[lucidrenegade]

The documentation for that board is janky. The web page says the M.2 slots are PCIe Gen 5 x4, but the manual says they’re x2. The quick start guide says it has 4 M.2 slots, when it obviously has 2. Don’t know that I would trust anything SM has to say.

 

[nexox]

The documentation for that board is janky. The web page says the M.2 slots are PCIe Gen 5 x4, but the manual says they’re x2. The quick start guide says it has 4 M.2 slots, when it obviously has 2. Don’t know that I would trust anything SM has to say.

The manual says "Two M.2 PCIe 5.0 x4" and the block diagram confirms it, the quick start guide confusingly says "sockets" when it's talking about retention screw holes, there are two options for each socket so that's 4, pretty clear if you look at the accompanying graphic.

put a 40G NIC into the x4 slot

I think you're going to have a hard time finding a PCIe 4.0 40G NIC, and that slot is connected through the chipset, so probably not the best for performance.