The ASUS S14NA-U12 is a motherboard that we noticed at SC23, and we knew that we would have liked to assessment the platform. It takes a single AMD EPYC 8004 “Siena” processor and exposes the platform’s PCIe Gen5 lanes, reminiscence, and extra whereas including its personal aptitude with 25GbE onboard. This can be a enjoyable motherboard, so allow us to get to it.
ASUS S14NA-U12 Overview
The motherboard itself is a CEB 12″ x 10.5″ dimension, making it about 0.9″ wider than an ordinary ATX motherboard. That’s necessary as a result of that further 0.9″ could imply that some chassis designed for a strict ATX motherboard dimension is not going to match. We’ve a very cool set of builds have been are doing with EPYC 8004 motherboards, and one space we needed to look into was the chassis we might use simply given the dimensions of this board.
The massive characteristic is the AMD socket SP6 (LGA 4844). If this appears to be like acquainted, this can be a related dimension to the AMD EPYC 7001-7003 generations and the AMD Threadripper strains thus far. Whereas the socket is a well-recognized dimension, which makes cooling simpler, it isn’t an electrically appropriate socket with the earlier generations.
AMD despatched us quite a lot of CPUs to make use of. We’re utilizing the AMD EPYC 8324P 32-core processor on this system, however that is only one of 4 ranging as much as the 64 core mannequin and even the prolonged temperature fashions on this motherboard.
One of many large options of the AMD EPYC 8004 sequence is the DDR5 reminiscence structure. The processor household helps 6-channel reminiscence, half of the EPYC 9004 sequence. It does, nevertheless, help 2 DIMMs per channel and so ASUS is offering that performance right here. If you’re coming from a 1st or 2nd era Intel Xeon Scalable, you should use the identical variety of reminiscence channels. The massive distinction is that with DDR5 reminiscence, it’s a lot sooner at DDR5-4800 speeds.
From an airflow perspective, this platform is optimized for entrance to rear airflow.
One of many actually attention-grabbing options that ASUS has is an array of MCIO connectors. All 5 of those connectors present PCIe Gen5 x8 so one will get cabled lanes equal to a Xeon E5 era CPU, however simply 4x as quick (PCIe Gen3 versus PCIe Gen5.) In case you have SSDs, for instance, you may simply use 10x 2.5″ PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs just like the Kioxia CM7 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD we reviewed through the use of these 5 headers.
The truth that they’re cabled within the entrance of the motherboard signifies that they’re normally nearer to the place the drives are put in, typically not requiring as many retimers, decreasing system prices.
Under the CPU socket and the MCIO headers, there are two M.2 slots that are PCIe Gen5 x4 every in addition to the ASUS POST code LCD.
One enjoyable a part of the slots is that one can go as much as M.2 2280 (80mm) however the different can go as much as M.2 22110 (110mm) in the event you needed to put in two totally different SSD sizes in a system. Our guess is that people will set up one SSD in these or set up two M.2 2280’s.
The PCIe slots are most likely a bit totally different than one may count on. There are two PCIe Gen5 x16 slots. The third slot (PCIE4) is a PCIe Gen5 x8 slot.
Below these is an ASPEED AST2600 BMC and associated parts for out-of-band administration.
The rear I/O has the out-of-band administration port, in addition to VGA and two USB 3 ports for native entry. The massive characteristic is the Broadcom BCM57414 that’s built-into the motherboard. There are not any 1GbE and even 10GbE ports right here, solely two SFP28 25GbE ports.
Subsequent, allow us to get to the block diagram.
