AMD EPYC 7003 Series Working Out Well With The Supermicro H12SSL-i

Following last month's launch of the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" series prominent motherboard vendors have been fairly quick to enable Milan support for capable motherboards originally launched for the prior EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors. For those in the market for a 1P ATX motherboard that will work with these exciting new server processors, the Supermicro H12SSL-i is a nice entry-level motherboard that gets the job done and with its BIOS v2.0 release is working well for the new Zen 3 server CPUs.

Leading up to the EPYC 7003 series launch AMD talked up the drop-in Milan upgrade abilities, of course, assuming the motherboard vendor follows through on providing the necessary BIOS update. In the weeks since the launch, that has fortunately panned out nicely. BIOS updates have been quick to materialize (in some cases, currently in "beta" form) from the prominent vendors like Supermicro, ASRockRack, ASUS, etc. Though note that it's for EPYC 7002 "Rome" designed motherboards and some of the older motherboard models designed for EPYC 7001 "Naples" that then saw a BIOS upgrade for Rome support haven't been seeing Milan support due to hardware limitations (thus sadly boards like the H11DSi-NT do not have Milan support).

If you are planning to assemble an EPYC Milan server on your own, motherboard availability during these volatile times can still be a bit of a challenge due to supply chain issues. In wanting to change out another one of the EPYC systems in the test lab with a motherboard offering EPYC 7003 compatibility to replace an older EPYC 7001/7002 motherboard, there were limited options in stock from the likes of Amazon and NewEgg.

What I ended up purchasing and has been running nicely with EPYC 7003 series processors including the flagship 280 Watt parts is the Supermicro H12SSL-i. The Supermicro H12SSL-i is a 1P EPYC 7003/7002 motherboard with support for eight DDR4-3200 DIMMs, five PCI Express 4.0 x16 slots, two PCI Express 4.0 x8 slots, dual PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots, dual Gigabit Ethernet, ASpeed AST2500 BMC, and all of the other usual features one would expect out of a basic server motherboard.

This Supermicro ATX motherboard retails for $410~450 USD and can be found at multiple Internet retailers from NewEgg to Amazon and others for those that may be wanting to assemble your own EPYC server. There seems to be decent availability still of the Supermicro H12SSL-i at these various Internet retailers in stock, which can't be said of all EPYC 7003/7002 motherboards at the moment, at least in the lower end price range. I personally picked up the H12SSL-i last month for $413 USD via Provantage, making it one of the most affordable EPYC 1P motherboards.

While shipping with the v1.0 BIOS as the BIOS v2.0 wasn't firmed up until February, upgrading the BMC firmware and BIOS is a straight-forward task. Once doing so, it was off to the races with the EPYC 7003 Milan support. I've been running various EPYC 7003 CPUs including the EPYC 7763 and 75F3 280 Watt processors fine with this motherboard paired with 8 x 16GB DDR4-3200 memory. This sub-$500 motherboard has been working out fine so far Milan with no issues to note.

Various AMD EPYC 7003 1P benchmarks will be coming up on Phoronix on this Supermicro motherboard over the weeks ahead as well as cross Linux/BSD operating system benchmarks and other interesting tests with now having an extra 7003 series test bed at hand. Today's article is just a quick shout-out for those wondering about available and lower-priced motherboard options for Milan and indeed the BIOS updates working out fine for the likes of the H12SSL-i. I've also done a BIOS upgrade for Milan on the ASRockRack ROMED8-2T and that too has been working out fine, but there that 1P ATX motherboard has currently limited availability at the major Internet retailers. The ASRockRack ROMED8-2T pushes closer to $600 USD but offers dual 10G LAN and other features, if relevant to your needs.