ASRock Rack 6U8X-EGS2 H200 NVIDIA HGX H200 AI Server Review

0

ASRock Rack 6U8X-EGS2 H200 Power Consumption

With eight 3kW 80Plus Titanium power supplies, we have 24kW total. Luckily, we do not need that much power. Instead, these are rated for 4+4 operation. Easier said, these have four primary PSUs and four for redundancy.

ASRock Rack 6U8X EGS2 H200 Rear Power Supplies Out
ASRock Rack 6U8X EGS2 H200 Rear Power Supplies Out

Here is a quick look at the Delta power supplies. These are high efficiency and high quality units, important for GPU servers.

ASRock Rack 6U8X EGS2 H200 3kW Rear PSUs
ASRock Rack 6U8X EGS2 H200 3kW Rear PSUs

Generally we got just over 2kW at idle when we had this system also configured with 10 NICs (8x ConnectX-7 and 2x BlueField-3 DPUs.) Each GPU idles usually in the 110-115W, and there are a ton of additional components in these systems. Under max load we saw just over 10kW. Depending on the application, you may actually get peaks well below that figure especially if your workloads are memory bandwidth bound. There is also some room to move up in terms of power consumption from what we had, so 12kW is probably the maximum for the system fully configured.

Perhaps the more important aspect is that you need to have a lot of power in each rack to run these AI servers, and the power consumption needs are only going up.

STH Server Spider: ASRock Rack 6U8X-EGS2 H200

In the second half of 2018, we introduced the STH Server Spider as a quick reference to where a server system’s aptitude lies. Our goal is to start giving a quick visual depiction of the types of parameters that a server is targeted at.

STH Server Spider ASRock Rack 6U8X-EGS2 H200
STH Server Spider ASRock Rack 6U8X-EGS2 H200

Of course, these systems are focused mainly on the GPU compute so they are not the densest for storage nor CPU compute and memory. Still, ASRock Rack does a great job of fitting a lot into 6U which is more or less the limit we have seen for density on air cooled designs. To go below 6U for eight of these NVIDIA H200 GPUs requires liquid cooling and a lot of very specific customization.

Final Words

This was super cool to get to review. We tested our first ASRock Rack 8-Way GPU Server back in 2015, almost a decade ago. Now the ASRock Rack 6U8X-EGS2 H200 brings the company’s offerings to the latest generation of NVIDIA HGX H200 AI servers.

ASRock Rack 6U8X EGS2 H200 Front Assembled
ASRock Rack 6U8X EGS2 H200 Front Assembled

The heart of the system is a PCIe switch board that not only connects the motherboard and the GPUs, but also has connectivity for the high-speed NICs offering 3.2Tbps of network bandwidth to the GPUs.

ASRock Rack 6U8X EGS2 H200 Front HGX Mating 1
ASRock Rack 6U8X EGS2 H200 Front HGX Mating 1

In terms of serviceability, we hope you liked the look at how the entire rear of the server is built. We showed almost every service item in this review through a ton of photos. There are some extra bits that ASRock Rack added in its design to make this system easier to configure and service while maintaining a 6U footprint.

ASRock Rack 6U8X EGS2 H200 Rear Components Out
ASRock Rack 6U8X EGS2 H200 Rear Components Out

Overall, the ASRock Rack 6U8X-EGS2 H200 performed well and shows how the company has been evolving its 8-way GPU designs over the almost decade since we first started reivewing them.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.