Anyone have experience with Supermicro H12SSL for EPYC CPU's?

[Zarathustra[H]]

I have many Supermicro boards and I stuff whatever memory I can snipe cheap on Ebay into them. Works fine.

This has been my experience with Supermicro boards too. I have yet to come across RAM that doesn't want to work on them. (as long as it is the right type).

That doesn't mean I want to have a "first time" though.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

From my memory, Supermicro can be flashed from a USB port to recover a bricked BIOS. But check out the motherboard support site to be sure before you buy. I've had to do it a few times but it's been a while ago.

As far as flashing goes, I was able to upload the ROM's from the BMC.

The instructions from Supermicro said to first update the BMC, and after that update the BIOS, so this is what I did, and it worked.

BIOS files are uploaded to the BMC and are flashed the next time the system is power cycled. This method does not require a CPU to be installed, which is convenient from the perspective of worrying about not having the right CPU to flash the BIOS to support the newest CPU.

The H12SSL BIOS update method is one of the most robust I've seen, with space in the ROM for multiple versions/backups you can switch between

The board arrived with BIOS 2.6a installed, so after updating the BMC I uploaded the 2.7 ROM via the BMC. It uploaded it to "staging", and next power cycle it was moved to "BIOS".

Looks like there are ample opportunities here to revert if things go awry, as long as you have a working BMC, and the BMC will run without CPU or RAM installed.

Its possible (or even probable) that all server boards do this these days, but I only have one server, and I only upgrade it every 5 years to a decade, so I don't get a ton of recent experience, so I was impressed

(I should probably backup the BMC image, huh)