Supermicro Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR / X13DEM Working Well For Dual Socket Xeon Max

With the Intel Xeon Max testing at Phoronix that's been ongoing so far for the past month on Phoronix has all been done within the Supermicro Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR rackmount server. This 2U dual socket platform for 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors has been working out well and provides a robust feature set while working out well for all of my Linux testing thus far.

Within the Supermicro SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR is the X13DEM motherboard, one of Supermicro's 4th Gen Xeon Scalable offerings with a proprietary motherboard form factor, offering 32 DDR5 DIMMs between the two sockets, and capable of handling up to 350 Watt processors. The X13DEM features the Intel C741 chipset and has eight SATA 3.0 ports, both USB 3.2 Gen1 and Gen2 ports via headers, five PCI Express 5.0 x16 slots, two PCIe 5.0 x16 AIOM slots (OCP 3.0 superset), and an M.2 2280 PCIe 5.0 x4 slot. This motherboard has pretty much all of the features you'd want from a 4th Gen Xeon Scalable platform from CXL to offering up to 8TB of system memory support between the 32 DIMM slots.

For local video connectivity the Supermicro X13DEM offers a standard VGA output, which is nice though would be great if it was complemented by mini-DP / DP or HDMI that we are finally beginning to see on more server platforms.

Built around the X13DEM motherboard, the Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR provides eight 2.5-inch hot-swap NVMe / SATA / SAS drive bays, a variety of networking options, and for PCIe connectivity this server chassis is equipped to handle up to 8 PCIe 5.0 x8 or 4 PCIe 5.0 x16 slots while supporting full double-width GPU/accelerator adapters.

The Supermicro SYS-221H-TNR is rated to handle up to 350 Watt TDP Socket E processors either on air cooling or optional liquid cooling. For the purposes of this Xeon Max 9468 and Xeon Max 9480 testing it's all been carried out on air cooling and has worked out very well for these Sapphire Rapids HBM2e processors.

All the specs in full for those interested can be found via Supermicro.com.

After more than one month so far using the Supermicro Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR / X13DEM since it was sent over by Supermicro and Intel for conducting Xeon Max Linux testing, this platform has continued to prove to work out very well under a variety of conditions and numerous Linux distributions.