ASUS S14NA-U12 Block Diagram
Here is the block diagram for the ASUS S14NA-U12:
ASUS has 40 lanes of PCIe Gen5 being used for slots, 40 lanes being used for MCIO connectors, 8 lanes for M.2, and the remaining eight lanes being used for the Broadcom BCM57414 25GbE. That Broadcom controller is not a PCIe Gen5 device, so these lanes are being run at lower speeds. Still, that is a ton of connectivity for a single CPU and platform.
For a lower-power platform, again, this is great connectivity.
ASUS ASMB11-iKVM Management
With this generation of servers, we have the new ASPEED AST2600 BMC. That means we also get a newer ASUS management solution.
The new solution appears to be MegaRAC-based and is called the ASUS ASMB11-iKVM.
This has all of the sensor readings and logs that one would expect, as well as not just a web GUI management interface but IPMI and Redfish capabilities.
One nice feature is that ASUS has the HTML5 iKVM with remote media as standard. We have seen other vendors charge for this capability, so it is nice that ASUS includes it here.
There are also standard features like being able to power cycle the server. One item we wish was here was the ability to boot to BIOS.
Next, let us get to the performance.
ASUS S14NA-U12 Performance
Overall, we tried several different processors in this motherboard, including the AMD EPYC 8534P(N) SKUs and the 8324P(N) parts.
We are testing two other platforms at the same time, and all achieve roughly similar performance with the same CPUs being cycled between them.
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Patrick
Do you know the expected retail price and if it will be compatible with future Zen 5C?
What was the idle power consumption like?
Any MCIO cables included?
Any link to MCIO cables for attaching those NVMe drives? (I’ve read that Supermicro H13SSL only supports one drive on the MCIO 8x ports with cables, two only with a Supermicro backplane!).
Hi Patrick,
Could you please provide some info about the power consumption of the board?
Thanks,
Emil
Patrick and crew,
Do you have recommendations for 1U and 2U rack enclosures, and for PDUs, for this motherboard? Quality and choice seems to be lagging compared to gaming cases. But maybe that’s just here in Europe.
Thanks, -Bert