u/StorageReview

Following up on Part 1, here's the service and storage half of our HP Z8 Fury G6i walkthrough.

The whole thing is built to service without tools. You flip the rear release plate, drop the slot tension, and lift the GPU out. The corner card is usually the pain point, so HP added a simple pivot mechanism that grabs the release and lets you lift it out without ramming your hand or a screwdriver into the case.

Storage is solid: four M.2 Gen5 x4 slots right on the motherboard at full performance, plus two pre-wired 3.5" bays for high-capacity drives.

Cooling is the reason it performs. Six fans in total, two large ones up front, two sitting over the memory on each side of the CPU, one on the CPU, and a rear exhaust. Even running two RTX PRO 6000 Max-Q cards through our benchmarks, we saw zero thermal throttling. Full numbers are in the review on our site.

We just published our review of the HP Z8 Fury G6i, and there's a lot the written piece doesn't fully convey, so we shot a walkthrough. Part 1 is here.

This thing is big in person. It supports up to four RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q GPUs at 300W each, so 1,200W of GPU before you add the Xeon (up to 86 cores), SSDs, and everything else. That's why it runs two hot-swap supplies rated 1,700W at 230V. On a standard 120V circuit, you physically can't power a fully loaded configuration from a single outlet. You can also run a single 600W card instead of the four Max-Q parts.

Inside, the layout is clean: GPU power cabling kept out of the airflow path, GPUs loaded in a set 1-2-3-4 order, and DRAM cooling broken out to each side of the CPU. Part 2 will get into storage and serviceability.

DRAM pricing is rough right now, so we're running an experiment on the bench: how much can you lean on flash instead of RAM in a GPU server before performance falls off too far?

The system is a Dell PowerEdge XE7740 with four RTX Pro 6000 Server Edition cards. At list, the full DRAM load is close to a quarter million dollars, and single DIMMs are running around $7,100 each today. So we're offloading KV cache onto the SSD tier in front of the GPUs, eight Solidigm D7-PS1030 high write endurance drives in a RAID 10, then physically removing 16 DIMMs. We pulled all the B-slot sticks so every channel stays populated, and memory runs at full speed, just half the capacity.

We already have a baseline collected with all the DRAM in place, so the next run shows the delta with the smaller RAM footprint and more pressure on the array. Goal is to map where the real stress points are when you spec a GPU server, and whether trading some RAM for more storage gets you a reasonable price/performance ratio.

We spent some time at HPE Discover with what may be the first fully liquid-cooled data center switch. The specs: 102.4 Tb/s total, 64 ports at 1.6 Tb/s, built on Broadcom Tomahawk 6, and Ultra Ethernet Transport-ready.

The cooling design is the fun part. There is no air cooling at all, no fans. The optics pull about two-thirds of the switch's total power, so the liquid flow is split to match: roughly two-thirds goes to the optics up front, the other third cools the switch chip, CPU, and DC-DC converter. Cold plates everywhere you look.

It is built to ORv3, 21 inches wide instead of the usual 19, and the back is all quick disconnects and bus-bar power. You push it into the rack, and it mates with DC power and the liquid manifold in one motion. No power cords, no cabling.

We got our first look at the HPE ProLiant Compute DL340e Gen12, the newest storage server in the ProLiant line. It's a single-socket Intel Xeon 6 box, 2U, and the layout is what makes it interesting.

Up front, you get up to 24 LFF 3.5-inch drives on a dual backplane with a mid-riser for density. The rear has room for up to 10 EDSFF NVMe drives, so you can run a true hybrid config: disk for bulk capacity, NVMe for caching and metadata. That rear NVMe bank is optional and removable. Skip it, and you can run up to six PCIe slots instead, plus two OCP slots either way.

We caught the new HPE ProLiant Compute DL394 Gen12 on the show floor at HPE Discover, lid off, and it's the first complete server we've seen built on NVIDIA's Vera CPU. Plenty have announced Vera, but this is a real box you can walk around.

The basics: 2U, NVIDIA MGX form factor, and HPE's first ProLiant with a Vera CPU. Vera is monolithic rather than chiplet, so it dodges the NUMA latency that creeps into high-core-count multi-socket designs. HPE rates it at 1.2 TB/s aggregate LPDDR5X, up to 14 GB/s per core, with the CPU positioned as an orchestrator for agentic AI and data processing.

What stood out at the booth: ConnectX-8 NICs and BlueField DPUs in the test unit, RTX Pro GPU support planned (HPE is still finalizing max GPU count), E1.S SSDs up front, and power supplies also up front with cabling run along the side so customers can choose front or rear power. It's air-cooled, with a fan bank in the middle pulling air front to back. HPE says fall 2026 availability.

The Brady M511 is a portable Bluetooth label printer, and we want to highlight its multi-user capability: it pairs with up to 5 devices at once. So we ran jobs in parallel off a single printer, Kevin labeling the onboard and high-speed Ethernet ports on the back of an XE9680 while Dylan handled the security camera cabling, and Brian motivates!

The headliner for us was the ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3, a deskside workstation built on the NVIDIA GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra superchip. 748GB of coherent memory and up to 20 petaFLOPS of AI compute. Pop the side and there is a single 1600W power supply, four M.2 slots, onboard 10GbE, and a liquid loop running across the back of the board, with a lot of copper sitting on the components up top. It is based on NVIDIA's DGX Station architecture, with Windows support coming later.

Out front ASUS had the ProArt RTX Spark lineup: the P14 and P16 notebooks in 14 and 16 inch sizes plus a ProArt Mini PC, each running NVIDIA RTX Spark with 128GB of unified memory and up to 1 petaflop of local compute. The signed ET900N tower on the stand was inscribed by Jensen Huang.

We spent some time in the ASUS private booth at Computex 2026 and the storage lineup was worth a look.

The headliner for us was a 1U server that normally carries eight to ten front NVMe bays. ASUS fit four more inside, so you get 12 U.2 NVMe bays in 1U on a single-socket Turin board. They're positioning it for partners like Weka and IBM.

The JBODs were fun too. One is an 80-bay design built to mitigate drive-to-drive vibration in high-density configs, with SAS-12G on the back. Another runs 60 3.5-inch HDDs plus eight rear NVMe bays and a single-socket AMD SP5 CPU, so you get bulk storage, flash, and compute in one chassis. Rounding it out was the all-NVMe VS320D-RS26N unified array (up to 26 dual-port U.2 NVMe, block and file).

Caught this at MSI's Computex booth, and the install is slick. Each NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 (the liquid-cooled Blackwell Server edition) sits on a tray that seats in a single motion. You line up the liquid quick-disconnect fittings, the blade power connector, and the PCIe slot, push them home, and that GPU is fully connected for 600W with liquid cooling, with no extra cabling running to the GPU. Worth noting, the card itself is single-width in this liquid-cooled form, slimmer than the double-wide air-cooled RTX PRO 6000, which helps pack them in.

This is the CG681-S6093, a 6U dual-socket AMD EPYC MGX platform that scales to eight of these GPUs, with ConnectX-8 networking up to 8x 400Gbps. The chassis even carries a warning to power down before pulling a cooling QD. Dense liquid setups usually make servicing miserable, so the slot-load approach stood out.

Found this at the back of the MSI booth. From the outside, it looks like a normal workstation, but the side door opens to reveal four EdgeXpert nodes (MSI's DGX Spark) stacked inside. Going from one node to four increases the pooled unified memory from 128GB to 512 GB.

Networking is flexible: this demo runs through an NVIDIA switch hidden under the cabinet, but each node has 200Gb ConnectX-7, so any 200GbE switch works. MSI also had three Sparks meshed back to back nearby, no external switch needed, and three is not the ceiling. We've meshed many Sparks in our lab.

One of the more fun builds we saw on the floor.

We stopped by the ASUS booth at Computex, and the theme was cooling options. Their HGX Rubin NVL8 reference design comes fully liquid-cooled (XA NR1I-E12LR) or as a hybrid (XA NR1I-E12L), where the GPU sled gets DLC, and the CPUs stay on air, for facilities that can't commit to full liquid cooling. Both run dual Intel Xeon 6 with up to 800G per GPU for east-west traffic.

Same story on the GPU server side: the XA NB3I-E12 runs NVIDIA HGX B300 fully air-cooled if you don't have facility water, and there's a denser liquid-cooled platform if you do. Also spotted signage for the ESC8000-E12P and ESC8000A-E13P, both MGX-compliant and NVIDIA OVX-certified.

We stopped by the Synology booth at Computex and got hands-on with the PAS7700, their new flagship array. It is all U.3 NVMe, 48 bays in 4U, with two active-active controllers. Since both controllers are already live, failover takes about 5 seconds, with IP failover groups keeping services up and running.

Protocol support is broad for one box: file and block, including NVMe/TCP, NVMe over Fibre Channel, RoCE, and NFS over RDMA. Synology rates it at up to 2 million IOPS and 30GB/s, and raw capacity scales to 1.65PB with expansion units. Controllers, fans, and the redundant power supplies are all modular, which you can see us pulling apart in the clip.

We stopped by MSI's booth at Computex 2026, where they had their 19" and 21" rack reference designs set up side by side, making for a great old-vs-new comparison. The 19" EIA air-cooled rack holds 16 dual-node (2U2N) systems with the usual dual PDUs and power cabling. The 21" 44OU ORv3 rack jumps to 28 dual-socket, dual-node (1OU2N) servers rated for up to 100kW with an integrated liquid-to-liquid CDU, and the rear is dramatically cleaner: a 48V busbar plus direct liquid cooling attachments instead of a wall of cables.

They also had one of the nodes out on the table (CD182-S6091-X2 DLC). Each node uses a dual-socket layout with cooling bars over the memory, cold plates on the CPUs, and built-in leak detection. CPUs are next-gen AMD parts we can't say much about yet. Dense design aimed at fully liquid-cooled environments.

Caught up with Synology's Cody Hall at Computex 2026. APM 2.0 is a generational jump from 1.2: native backup for Proxmox and Nutanix lands alongside ESXi and Hyper-V, and cross-platform restore works in any direction. Nutanix to ESXi, Proxmox to wherever. Google Workspace support finally joins Microsoft 365 on the SaaS side.

The part that got our attention was restore-time protection. Anomaly detection runs while backups are collected, then malware scanning runs again when you restore. If the version you picked is dirty, it falls back to the last clean one. Anyone who's spent a weekend on ransomware cleanup knows the pain of re-injecting bad data at the finish line. Two clicks to turn it all on.

The Proxmox support is aimed straight at the post-Broadcom migration crowd.

From the MSI booth at Computex 2026. The XpertStation WS300 is a GB300 workstation that's liquid cooled: copper cold plates on the motherboard components, pump in the chassis, and massive radiator/fan assemblies on the side AND top. Cooling hardware looked like CoolIT.

Another star was the platform next to it. Slot-loading RTX Pro 6000s. Pop the top off, drop a GPU in, and quick-connect fittings handle power and liquid in one motion.

The booth had way more than fits in one clip. More to come.