MiTAC Intel Denali Pass High-End Liquid Cooled 2U 4-Node Review

This is a really fun one that I have wanted to do for some time. Today, we are going to look at the MiTAC Intel Denali Pass in a different light, specifically the awesome 2U 4-node liquid-cooled server. This is not just a simple “here are two CPU cold plates and some fittings and tubes” job. Instead, it is almost entirely a liquid-cooled system, down to the fanless 3kW power supplies we showed earlier this week.

Just as a quick note to our readers. The 4th and 5th Gen Intel Xeon/ Xeon Max CPUs are still the latest generation. At the same time, after going through these systems over the past few weeks, we were left with a quandary on how to present it. Since the chip performance and capabilities are relatively well-known, and we had an enormous number of photos, so we decided to focus a bit more on the cool innovations on the systems and just show you in photos.

MiTAC Intel Denali Pass High-End Liquid Cooled 2U 4-Node Overview

Of course, for this one, we have a video:

For a bit of context, at STH we broke the news that Intel was exiting the server business selling it to MiTAC. Part of the current generation of products that MiTAC got in that deal was the Intel DNP or Denali Pass server.

Denali Pass is not just a 2U 4-node liquid-cooled server. There are other options for air cooling, PCIe GPUs, OAM GPUs, and 2U half-width nodes. We used a 2U single-node Denali Pass system in our Intel Xeon MAX 9480 Deep-Dive.

For today’s review, we are saying it is sponsored by MiTAC. They let us borrow both a liquid-cooled and an air-cooled system so we could do some side-by-side testing.

That side-by-side comparison really shows the extent to which MiTAC’s DNP systems will remove 95% of all heat from the server via liquid cooling.

If you do not know MiTAC, they build systems for hyper-scale customers but also have brands like Tyan that you may have heard of. The company has been growing organically, but also through acquisitions like buying the Intel DSG business. They now have manufacturing facilities to do large scale rack integration.

As a fun one, we saw a video of the company’s manufacturing and caught this screenshot:

That is a variant of the Tyan GC70-B8033 server we just reviewed. Tyan is one of MiTAC’s brands. Between the MiTAC hyper-scale business, the Tyan line, and the Intel DSG lines, MiTAC has a broad product portfolio, from motherboards to liquid-cooled integrated racks. While we have reviewed servers and motherboards before from Tyan and the Intel DSG side, today, we are going to look at something neat: just how much goes into a higher-end liquid-cooled solution.

With that, let us get to the hardware.