CPUs with a Thermal Design Power (TDP) rating of up to 400W per socket are supported. Of the 24x storage bays in front, up to 16x bays support hot-swap NVMe drives with the remaining 8x drive bays compatible with NVMe, SAS, and SATA drive types. Supported configurations also include all NVMe, all SAS, or all SATA. The ASUS RS720A-E12-RS24U Server does require a RAID card for SAS drive support. There are several different options for PCIe slots with up to 9x PCIe Gen5 slots possible plus an internal RAID slot. If installing GPUs then the OCP 3.0 card slot is not supported. A RAID/PIKE cable kit is required for internal slot support.
PCIe Slot Options:
This is an adaptable platform that can be configured to support a number of different workloads including AI and high-performance (HPC) workloads with the addition of up to 3x dual-slot GPUs. GPUs supported include the NVIDIA A100 and A40, plus AMD Instinct and Xilinx options. For network connectivity, the RS720A-E12-RS24U can be outfitted with 2x 10GbE or 4x 1GbE LAN modules. An adjacent PCIe 5.0 OCP 3.0 mezzanine card slot can also be installed offering an additional network connectivity port and bandwidth options for greater flexibility.
Infrastructure management is provided by the ASUS ASMB11-iKVM remote control with integrated ASPEED AST2600 module on the motherboard. ASUS Control Center IT Management Software for enterprise systems provides an intuitive HTML-5 interface to manage your network assets from a number of different devices anywhere, at any time. It offers centralized management and automation for a number of common administrative tasks. Licensing is required but it can manage servers, workstations, commercial products, and other brand devices.