ASRock Rack 4U8G-TURIN2 Power Consumption
Our sytem came with two AcBel 2kW 80Plus Platinum power supplies. As mentioned earlier, the specs for this one say that we should have 2.7kW 80Plus Titanium power supplies that would be better, especially for high-end configurations.
It feels a bit strange giving power consumption figures using the wrong power supplies, plus we also were using a mixed set of accelerators in pairs of GPUs instead of having sets of eight GPUs. Still, a good rule of thumb would be that the AMD EPYC CPUs can use their 500W each, memory and SSDs are often another 250-300W, NICs can vary from around 15W to 100W. Along with that you have eight GPUs, FPGAs, AI accelerators, CXL memory cards that have fairly different power consumption. Finally you can add another 10-20% for cooling. That formula should get you in the right range for this server. We managed to get to get the system to just over 5kW but there is certainly room for that to go up.
In terms of noise, it should be run in a data center.
STH Server Spider: ASRock Rack 4U8G-TURIN2
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.
This is a server mostly focused on GPU compute, however, we will quickly note that filled with CXL memory expansion devices it can alternatively be configured for high memory capacity as well. Really, this is a very flexible platform. At the same time, we are just going to use a STH Server Spider for what we think is the most common use case.
Final Words
It is hard to believe that we reviewed our first ASRock Rack 8-GPU server back in 2015. Almost ten years later, the AI server has gone from a lower-volume “fringe” server to a higher volume and higher value segment of the market. The ASRock Rack 4U8G-TURIN2 really shows that evolution with a refined and more flexible design but also with drastically more compute capacity. Taking advantage of the new AMD EPYC 9004/ 9005 CPUs means the system can skip using PCIe switches, which is a big bonus for those trying to reduce complexity and power consumption.
Overall, this was a really neat design, and something that both looks familiar, but might have been hard to imagine a decade ago.
> two M.2 slots under the 2.5″ storage and PCIe expansion slots on the motherboard. These are lower speed PCIe Gen3 x2 slots
According to the block diagram these are Gen 3 x4 slots, although the first one had a rather interest lane arrangement where one lane is reused for a SATA controller if SATA m.2 SSDs are used.