ASRock Rack MECAI-GH200 Short-Depth NVIDIA Grace Hopper Server

The ASRock Rack MECAI-GH200 is a short-depth NVIDIA Grace Hopper server. We saw the system at NVIDIA GTC 2024 and took a few photos. We thought we would include this one since we are showing a few of these systems this week. Given the number of different short-depth Grace Hopper servers we saw, it feels like there is an emerging market for this kind of system.

ASRock Rack MECAI-GH200 Short-Depth NVIDIA Grace Hopper Server

The system is built upon the NVIDIA MGX spec as a short-depth server. The server is designed for front I/O and service. This is common for racks like telco racks where there is often a single side service aisle.

The right side has our I/O including base management functions, I/O slots for networking, redundant power supplies, and EDSFF E1.S NVMe SSD slots.

The power cables coming out of the power supplies are really interesting. They give the option to either power the system via front or rear power feeds.

Here is the NVIDIA BlueField-3 installed in the system. One can see the cabled PCIe Gen5 x16 slots and the hard partitioning of the expansion slots from the Grace Hopper side of the system.

Here is the rear. We can see a large fan array.

The cables from the front power supplies route to these rear power inputs making for a single server that can be installed with either front or rear power feeds while still keeping the service items and cables on the front of the system.

Here is the giant NVIDIA GH200 heatsink and also the baseboard. The baseboard has a M.2 riser on the right side. There are also MCIO connectors to cable PCIe to the various slots in the system.

Next to this, we saw a Cooler Master Grace Hopper Liquid Cooling Loop.

The other vertical board next to the GH200 heatsink is there for a baseboard management controller. In this case, this is an ASPEED controller for IPMI.

These cards can be swapped for other management options if a customer needs something else.

Final Words

This is certainly an intriguing little system. We are going to start our review series in this segment fairly cool. Still, it is great seeing all of these systems at the show. The 2U short-depth is a really different form factor to see a high-end ~1kW CPU, GPU, and memory module.