ASRock Rack 1U12E-GENOA/2L2T Power Consumption
The power supplies are 1kW Delta units. As 80Plus Platinum power supplies, they are relatively efficient.
At idle, this was another AMD EPYC Genoa system running in the 115-135W range. Our maximum power consumption was in the 450-500W range at the top end focusing on CPU and memory testing. That leaves 500-550W available for all of the components like NVMe SSDs and add-in cards. That should be enough, but PCIe Gen5 devices tend to use a lot of power these days.
STH Server Spider ASRock Rack 1U12E-GENOA/2L2T
In the second half of 2018, we introduced the STH Server Spider as a quick reference to where a server system’s aptitude lies. Our goal is to start giving a quick visual depiction of the types of parameters that a server is targeted at.
While this system is only a single socket platform, it still offers a lot of density given the 12x + 2 NVMe SSD situation (up to just over 750TB total possible with today’s drives.) It also has 24 DIMMs while there is only a single CPU. The CPU is a bit more limited in its TDP. It would have been great if ASRock Rack supported 128-core Bergamo parts. Overall, one can put a lot of storage, and memory in this platform and SP5 offers a lot of core density as well.
Final Words
At no point during the review process did our team call this server “fancy” and that is exactly the point. ASRock has some of our favorite unique servers, but this is a more mainstream platform that is dedicated to a single purpose: getting a lot of storage, CPU, and memory into 1U relatively inexpensively. In that goal it excels.
Our general sense is that there are a set of customers that prefer things like having standard connectors instead of “fancy” solutions. ASRock Rack uses a more utilitarian approach. At the same time, this simplicity means that one can consolidate 2020-2021 era Intel Xeon dual-socket servers into a single socket. That makes the ASRock Rack 1U12E/2L2T very attractive to the modern wave of consolidation.
I thoroughly enjoyed the article, Patrick. New platform, new words and ideas; and i appreciate the almost total absence of copy and paste in the article :)