ASUS ESC NB8-E11 vs HPE ProLiant Compute XD685 (HGX B200)
Both are built on the NVIDIA HGX B200 8-GPU 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 NB8-E11 | HPE ProLiant Compute XD685 (HGX B200) |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | ASUS | HPE |
| Part number | — | S4R96A |
| Form factor | rack | rack |
| Released | — | 2025 |
| Accelerator | 8x B200 | 8x B200 |
| Aggregate memory | 1.4 TB | 1.4 TB |
| Aggregate bandwidth | 64.0 TB/s | 64.0 TB/s |
| System power | — | — |
| Interconnect | NVIDIA NVLink with NVSwitch, 1,800 GB/s GPU-to-GPU; one-GPU-to-one-NIC topology with up to 8 NICs | NVLink 5.0 / NVSwitch 4.0 across the HGX B200 baseboard; 4x FHHL PCIe Gen5 x16 slots for fabric, NIC or DPU |
Rows shown in grey are identical between the two.
ASUS ESC NB8-E11
A 10U eight-GPU server built on the NVIDIA Blackwell HGX B200 baseboard, with dual 5th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors at 350 W and NVLink giving 1,800 GB/s directly between GPUs, twice the bandwidth of the Hopper-generation ESC N8-E11. It uses a dedicated one-GPU-to-one-NIC topology supporting up to eight NICs, and offers up to 11 PCIe slots, 32 DIMM slots, 10 NVMe bays and dual 10Gb LAN, with 5+1 80 PLUS Titanium supplies. Unlike many B200 platforms it is air-cooled, using dedicated CPU and GPU airflow tunnels, which is what accounts for the 10U height. ASUS publishes no FLOPS figure of its own, so the compute shown is NVIDIA's for the HGX B200 baseboard, including the sparse figures NVIDIA publishes for Blackwell. 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.
Vendor product pageHPE ProLiant Compute XD685 (HGX B200)
The eight-way XD685 in its NVIDIA HGX B200 configuration, liquid cooled only, in the 5U DLC chassis S4R96A. HPE names B200 support twice in the QuickSpecs, in the supported-accelerator list and in the rule that the H200 and B200 liquid-cooled accelerators must be paired with this chassis, so the configuration is not in doubt. The accelerator kit part number is not recorded: the accelerator table lists two entries both described as HGX B300 with different part numbers, one of which is likely the B200 mislabelled, and guessing which would put an unverified number on a row buyers may quote. Two fifth-generation AMD EPYC processors, 24 DIMM slots and up to 6 TB of DDR5-6400. HPE publishes no system power draw, only twelve 3,000 W supplies, so nothing is summed; compute is NVIDIA's for the baseboard.
Vendor product page