r/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.