The Gigabyte E283-S90 is an exciting edge server. While we often review edge servers designed for single socket and lower power applications, there is an entire segment of edge servers that are higher-performance. This is undoubtedly in that higher-performance category. If you look at the front faceplate of this server, you might think it offers very little expansion capability. Once you get inside it, you see how much flexibility they made. Let us get into it.
Gigabyte E283-S90 External Hardware Overview
The Gigabyte E283-S90 is a 2U server that is 625mm deep or just over 24.6″ deep.
The first feature many of our readers will notice is that the front of the chassis has no hot-swappable storage. On the left side, the rack ear simply has basic status LEDs and power control.
On the other rack ear we get two USB ports.
Moving to the rear of the server, we can see that there is actually a lot of expansion potential.
On the left rear we get two 2.5″ drives, and a power supply.
On the right, we get another two 2.5″ drive bays and a second power supply.
In the middle, we can load eight expansion cards, plus we have our rear server I/O block.
In terms of expansion, we can add up to eight PCIe Gen5 x16 full-height half-length cards in risers. A caveat is that using XCC die CPUs in a 4x UPI link configuration will drop one of these to PCIe Gen4. In addition, we have two OCP NIC 3.0 slots also at PCIe Gen5 x16 speeds.
In the center, we have our rear server I/O. We have a management port, two USB ports, and two 1GbE ports, each using the Intel i350-am2 NIC.
A feature that probably sticks out is that there is no legacy VGA port. Instead, we get a mini DisplayPort.
The power supplies for this are dual 1.6kW 80Plus Titanium units.
Next, let us get inside the system.
What’s the reliability like for Gigabyte servers? I’ve had a few of their components over the years (motherboards, video cards and power supplies) and I found them pretty flaky and had to return a few, until eventually I got ones that worked well enough for a year or two then developed problems again. Since then I’ve steered clear of them. Are their servers similar in this respect, or do they design them better than their consumer gear?
This looks like it was designed backwards, in comparison to the server in your reviews of: Supermicro Hyper-E / SYS-220HE-FTNR, Gigabyte E251-U70, Supermicro ARS-210ME-FNR 2U or ASUS EG500-E11 and (not reviewed) Asus EG520-E11-RS6-R.
Were it necessary to have rear I/O Mitxpc seems to have a good idea with their mini rackmount servers with rear-io; where the I/O is reversible, and can be moved to the front instead.
If you plan on swapping out fans more than anything else I can see the benefit of this design.
Still, thanks for reviewing this, as it caters to someone who wants this; maybe for their colocated rack power sized systems.
Is there a way to search the server reviews based on the spider score? Say I am interested in high compute density and would like to just read the reviews above a particular score?
Hey Ryan – We do not have this, but it is a good idea. We probably need to time or generational bound it as well. A high density CPU compute from 2019 with 64 cores/ socket will be very tiny by Q1 2025.
I cannot see any U2 or U3 SSD slots… instead poor old SATA !
Last year, I have been able to buy KINGSTON U2 Enterprise for less than their SATA counterpart. But these excellent U2 have been discontinued and not replaced by Kingston.
Nevertheless, the Micron U3 are accepted by my DELL PowerEdge R650.
I still see a lot of crazy high prices for 12 Gb SAS SSDs which are faster than SATA but really slower if you compare to NVMe PCIe gen3 or gen4.
Maybe the reason of this situation comes from CTOs afraid of buying their SSDs from a third party seller and stuck with the server manufacturer (ie DELL, HP, Lenovo).