Supermicro H11SSL-NC Server Motherboard Review (Page 11)

Here are key points about the Supermicro H11SSL-NC.

What's Hot

Tons of PCI-E: AMD's EPYC CPUs are known to offer a ton of PCI-E connectivity, and this motherboard takes full advantage of the PCI-E to fill up tons of PCI-E slots, all of which run full speed at all times. The motherboard is also capable of supporting many different types of storage, including two NVMe ports, one M.2 slot, and a vast variety of everything from USB to SAS.

LSI SAS: To expand SAS, Supermicro added on an LSI RAID controller so that users will have high-performance options when it comes to SAS drives. Along with the two NVMe connectors that look similar, you also get two SAS connectors.

High-Quality Components: The motherboard supports high TDP CPUs, and even though you can't overclock them, it's still very important to use quality VRM hardware to ensure temperatures stay low. The 70A IR/Infineon power stages here are brand new and designed for extremely high current server processors, and they probably aren't cheap either since they were recently released.

Octa-Channel Memory: The motherboard offers the ability to run eight sticks in 8-channels, which results in crazy memory bandwidth.

What's Not

One DIMM Per Channel: On this motherboard, we get only one DIMM per channel, so you are limited to 8-DIMMs while many other motherboards might offer 16.

Final Thoughts

Supermicro's H11SSL-NC performed well and supported the CPU quite well. We were a bit concerned about whether or not we would be able to get all 8-channels to work, but the system booted up the first time, although we did not know it. By default the system is configured for IPMI, so we had to go into the BIOS remotely and change primary display to off-board graphics.

Booting the server motherboard takes a bit of time because it needs to initialize the SAS controller. The quality of the motherboard is quite good as well, and the VRMs stayed cool even when the CPU was being loaded for hours while running out SPECwpc tests.

If you need a solid server motherboard with a lot of options, give the Supermicro H11SSL-NC a look.