Supermicro E102-13R-H Review: A Raptor Lake-P 3.5-inch SBC System for Embedded Applications

Single-board computers in the 3.5-inch form-factor have become extremely popular for embedded applications involving a mix of high performance requirements as well as extended peripherals support. Typical use-case scenarios include digital signage, edge inferencing solutions, retail applications, and IoT gateways. The requirements in these deployments call for processors and components that can operate in a wide temperature range. The chassis and cooling solution handle other duties such as ruggedness and avoidance of moving parts.

The Supermicro X13SRN-H-WOHS is a 3.5-inch SBC with a soldered-down Intel Core i7-1370PE - a Raptor Lake-P embedded processor with vPro support. It has plenty of I/O support, including a SlimSAS PCIe expansion slot. Supermicro also offers a ready-to-deploy solution using the SBC in the actively-cooled SYS-E102-13R-H box PC. A majority of the motherboard ports are left un-used in this configuration, but the exposed ones should suffice for the most common use-cases.

The review below takes a detailed look at the features and performance profile of the SYS-E102-13R-H, along with an evaluation of the thermal solution.

Introduction and Product Impressions

Supermicro's SYS-E102-13R-H box PC is based on the company's X13SRN-H-WOHS 3.5-inch SBC board. WOHS stands for 'Without-Integrated-Heat-Sink'. The board is also available in a version with an integrated heat sink for users needing access to all of the motherboard's I/O features. The SYS-E102-13R-H box PC takes the WOHS board variant and places it in the CSE-E102TF2 - a compact enclosure with a single 40 x 40 x 15 mm fan on one side. The chassis provides support for external WLAN antennae, along with cut-outs for all the external I/O ports on the board. The front of the case has the power button alone, with all the other features relegated to the rear.

Despite the SYS-E102-13R-H being tagged as an IoT SuperServer, the system does not support ECC memory or in-band ECC. There is no separate BMC, but that is not a surprise for a machine based on a 3.5-inch SBC board. However, to make up for that, the SYS-E102-13R-H does support vPro and remote management capabilities use AMT. The system also supports Supermicro's monitoring utility 'SuperDoctor' - this allows Nagios integration for centralized infrastructure monitoring.

The box PC forsakes many of the interesting I/O capabilities of the internal board (such as the multitude of USB and SATA ports, as well as the PCIe SlimSAS port that can be used for additional expansion). The user gets two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports and two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports (10 Gbps each). Two NBASE-T RJ-45 connectors (up to 2.5 Gbps) are available.

In addition to the main unit, Supermicro supplies a lockable 12V 7A (84W) DC power adapter and mounting hardware for the system.

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Access to the SSD and RAM slots are via a removable panel on the underside kept in place with the aid of four screws.

The underside has three M.2 slots - two for M.2 2280 SSDs, and one for a M.2 2230 WLAN / BT card. A nano-SIM slot is also easily accessible near between the first two M.2 slots.

Our review system came pre-installed with 2x 16GB DDR5 SO-DIMMs and a PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe drive (despite the system supporting PCIe 4.0 x4 drives in the M.2 slots). The full specifications of the review sample are provided in the table below.

The SSD and RAM supplied along with the review sample are both rated for wide-temperature operation. These are necessary for specific deployment scenarios.

In the next section, we take a look at the system setup and follow it up with a detailed platform analysis.