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

For those wondering about the thermal and power characteristics of the Supermicro Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR, I collected some statistics while running with two of the flagship Xeon Max 9480 processors on air cooling in HBM caching mode with 512GB of DDR5 system memory. A variety of Linux server workloads were tested on this server running Ubuntu 23.04.

Under load the CPU0 Xeon Max 9480 had an average temperature of 41 degrees with an observed peak of 51 degrees. Not bad at all for this air-cooled Xeon Max server! The idle temperature was around 31 degrees. There were some initial concerns around the Xeon Max with HBM2e being air-cooled rather than liquid cooled, but this Supermicro server has worked out well with all of my Xeon Max 9468/9480 testing thus far.

The overall system temperatures were also in good shape for this Supermicro 2U server while running the Xeon Max 9480 processors.

No issues with the NVMe drive ventilation with the layout of this Supermicro server.

The combined two socket Xeon Max 9480 power consumption under load was on average around 601 Watts with a recorded peak of 1087 Watts, at least for what's exposed via the Intel PowerCap / RAPL sysfs interface. However, at times the PowerCap interface does appear slightly inaccurate. As the AC system power consumption was also monitored via the IPMI interface and it reported for the same set of benchmarks:

The Supermicro SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR on average was pulling around 773 Watts total with a peak of 897 Watts, lower than the reported 1087 Watts of the PowerCap interface.

In any event these are just some basic figures for confirming that there weren't any thermal/power issues with the SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR even when using two of the Xeon Max 9480 processors. Those interested in the individual benchmarks ran and the per-test power/thermal metrics can find all of my raw data here.

Among the Phoronix articles so far where this SuperMicro 2U Sapphire Rapids server has been used for testing include Intel Xeon Max 9480/9468 Show Significant Uplift In HPC & AI Workloads With HBM2e and Intel Xeon Max Performance Delivers A Powerful Combination With AMX + HBM2e. Further testing remains ongoing for the Intel Xeon Max CPUs with Supermicro's SYS-221H-TNR. So far it's been a rock solid platform and stay tuned for more benchmarking on it.

Thanks to Intel and Supermicro for making this testing possible. Those wishing to learn more about the Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR can visit Supermicro.com.