HPE Compute XD690 vs HPE ProLiant Compute XD685 (HGX B300)
Both are built on the NVIDIA HGX B300 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 | HPE Compute XD690 | HPE ProLiant Compute XD685 (HGX B300) |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | HPE | HPE |
| Part number | S6G97A | S6Y07A |
| Form factor | rack | rack |
| Released | 2025 | 2025 |
| Accelerator | 8x B300 | 8x B300 |
| Aggregate memory | 2.1 TB | 2.1 TB |
| Aggregate bandwidth | 64.0 TB/s | 64.0 TB/s |
| System power | 14.3 kW | — |
| Interconnect | NVLink 5.0 / NVSwitch 4.0 across the HGX B300 baseboard; 8x NVIDIA ConnectX-8 for InfiniBand XDR or Spectrum-X Ethernet scale-out | NVLink 5.0 / NVSwitch 4.0 across the HGX B300 baseboard; 4x FHHL PCIe Gen5 x16 slots for fabric, NIC or DPU |
Rows shown in grey are identical between the two.
HPE Compute XD690
A 10U air-cooled single-node chassis carrying eight NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra SXM6 GPUs on the HGX B300 baseboard, which HPE names directly in the orderable part S6A37A. Two Intel Xeon 6 processors with P-cores drive it, either the 6776P or the 6767P, both 64-core at 350 W, with up to 32 DDR5 DIMMs and a minimum system memory of 2,048 GB running at 5,200 MT/s in the two-DIMM-per-channel configuration HPE recommends for performance. Scale-out is eight ConnectX-8 adapters supporting InfiniBand XDR or Spectrum-X Ethernet, with storage of eight E1.S drives and two M.2. Power comes from twelve fixed 3,200 W Titanium supplies in an N+N redundant arrangement, and HPE rates the machine at 14.3 kW continuous and 16.4 kW peak. Air cooling a Blackwell Ultra system of this density is unusual and it shows in the mechanicals: the chassis weighs 226 kg, ships pre-racked by default, and HPE requires a server lift on site before its engineers will service it. HPE describes it as delivering 50 percent higher FP4 performance than the prior Blackwell generation but publishes no FLOPS figure of its own, so the compute shown is NVIDIA's specification for the HGX B300 board rather than an HPE claim.
Vendor product pageHPE ProLiant Compute XD685 (HGX B300)
The eight-way XD685 in its NVIDIA HGX B300 configuration, which requires the high-power liquid-cooled chassis S6Y07A rather than the standard DLC one. This is the denser sibling of the air-cooled XD690, which reaches the same eight Blackwell Ultra GPUs in 10U where this does it in 5U. Two fifth-generation AMD EPYC processors, 24 DIMM slots and up to 6 TB of DDR5-6400, eight EDSFF NVMe E3.S drives. HPE publishes no system power draw for the XD685, only twelve 3,000 W Titanium supplies with ten deployable, so unlike the XD690 no figure is recorded; the compute shown is NVIDIA's specification for the HGX B300 baseboard rather than an HPE claim.
Vendor product page