ASUS ESC NB8-E11 vs Penguin Solutions Altus XE4318GTS-DTC
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 | Penguin Solutions Altus XE4318GTS-DTC |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | ASUS | Penguin Solutions |
| Part number | — | Altus XE4318GTS-DTC |
| Form factor | rack | rack |
| Released | — | — |
| Accelerator | 8x B200 | 8x B200 |
| Aggregate memory | 1.4 TB | — |
| Aggregate bandwidth | 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 | Penguin publishes no interconnect figure; expansion is 8x PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL and 4x PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL double-width |
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 pagePenguin Solutions Altus XE4318GTS-DTC
The Penguin Solutions Altus XE4318GTS-DTC is a 4U GPU server carrying eight NVIDIA HGX B200 SXM modules of 180 GB each, hosted by AMD EPYC 9005/9004 Series processors with 8x PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL and 4x PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL double-width. The DTC suffix marks Penguin's direct-to-chip liquid cooling, which is what folds an eight-accelerator Blackwell baseboard into 4U where the air-cooled equivalent needs 8U. Penguin publishes only rack height, host processor, expansion slots and the accelerator for its servers, so no power draw, total memory, interconnect bandwidth or throughput figure is shown here; its full datasheets are hosted off its own domain and were not used as a source.
Vendor product page