Tyan Transport HX FT65T-B8030 AMD EPYC GPU Pedestal Server Review

Tyan Transport HX FT65T-B8030 Power Consumption and Noise

We tested the 2kW PSU at 208V because that is the primary power we have for the data center. It is also a single 80Plus Platinum PSU versus a redundant PSU that should provide slightly better efficiency.

For this, we wanted to get some sense of how much power the system is using with an AMD EPYC 7443 CPU and 256GB of memory that we can imagine will be a common configuration. We used this same CPU on the 2U system because we wanted to have a reference point for the 1U. 200W TDP is right on the edge of where ambient temperatures matter in the 1U platform.

We saw an idle of around 0.52kW. We saw maximum power consumption of around 1.46kW but most of our workloads ran in the 1.2-1.39kW range. We would probably be worried about running four high-end GPUs along with a full system on 120V power or lower due to the 1500W max rating on the power supply. That is just something to keep in mind when configuring this system to match the location it is being installed into.

In terms of noise, the fans do spin up and down, but with our higher-end configuration, we would certainly say it needs to be located in a server room or data closet since it can get loud. We were checking out the rack in the data center, and running a workload on this was certainly individually distinguishable even in that environment.

STH Server Spider: Tyan Transport HX FT65T-B8030

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.

Generally, pedestal servers are not optimized for density. The key value proposition of these servers is their ability to be placed in locations without extensive rack infrastructure. This has some storage, and some ability to add high-speed networking, but it is really designed to bring four double-width accelerators to locations without racks. As a result, it is built with a little of everything but not maximized to an extreme along one axis.

Final Words

This is a really interesting server. We get a single AMD EPYC CPU that lowers the cost and footprint over previous generations where we would have had to use two Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs for a server like this.

The Transport HX FT65T-B8030 was able to keep our NVIDIA A100 40GB PCIe cards cool and we saw fairly good performance as a result. The performance did come at the trade-off of having to add extra fans to the system.

Overall, the Tyan Transport HX FT65T-B8030 worked well to bring a suite of capabilities to the pedestal server market using a more modern platform than we have seen in previous attempts by others in this class.