ASUS ESC N8-E11 vs HPE ProLiant Compute XD685 (HGX H200)
Both are built on the NVIDIA HGX H200 baseboard, so their accelerator performance is identical rather than merely similar. The choice between them is chassis, cooling, expansion and supplier, not FLOPS.
What actually differs
| Specification | ASUS ESC N8-E11 | HPE ProLiant Compute XD685 (HGX H200) |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | ASUS | HPE |
| Part number | — | — |
| Form factor | rack | rack |
| Released | — | 2025 |
| Accelerator | 8x H200 | 8x H200 |
| Aggregate memory | 1.1 TB | 1.1 TB |
| Aggregate bandwidth | 38.4 TB/s | 38.4 TB/s |
| System power | — | — |
| Interconnect | NVIDIA NVLink with NVSwitch, 900 GB/s GPU-to-GPU; one-GPU-to-one-NIC topology with up to 8 NICs | NVLink 4.0 / NVSwitch 3.0 across the HGX H200 baseboard; 4x FHHL PCIe Gen5 x16 slots for fabric, NIC or DPU |
Rows shown in grey are identical between the two.
ASUS ESC N8-E11
A 7U eight-GPU server built on the NVIDIA HGX baseboard, with dual 5th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors at 350 W, NVLink giving 900 GB/s directly between GPUs, and a dedicated one-GPU-to-one-NIC topology supporting up to eight NICs. It offers up to 12 PCIe slots, 32 DIMM slots, 10 NVMe bays, dual 10Gb LAN and optional OCP 3.0, with 4+2 80 PLUS Titanium supplies and support for direct-to-chip liquid cooling alongside separate CPU and GPU airflow tunnels. ASUS offered it with either the HGX H100 or the HGX H200 baseboard; the figures here are for the H200 configuration. ASUS publishes no FLOPS figure of its own, so the compute shown is NVIDIA's for the HGX H200 baseboard this machine carries. Note that ASUS's detailed specification tab does not render server-side, so chassis dimensions, weight and power supply wattages could not be read and are deliberately absent rather than estimated.
Vendor product pageHPE ProLiant Compute XD685 (HGX H200)
The eight-way XD685 in its NVIDIA HGX H200 configuration, the only one of the four HPE offers in both air-cooled and liquid-cooled form: 6U for air with accelerator kit S3P89A, 5U for direct liquid cooling with S4X53A. Two fifth-generation AMD EPYC processors drive it, from 32 to 96 cores and 280 to 400 W, across 24 DIMM slots with twelve channels per socket and up to 6 TB of DDR5-6400. Storage is eight EDSFF NVMe E3.S drives, or twelve with a storage controller, plus RAID-1 M.2 boot. No chassis part number is recorded because two apply depending on cooling, S4Q28A for air and S4R96A for liquid. HPE publishes no system power draw for the XD685, only twelve 3,000 W Titanium supplies with ten deployable, so nothing is summed here; the compute figures are NVIDIA's for the HGX H200 baseboard rather than an HPE claim.
Vendor product page