HPE ProLiant Compute XD685 (HGX B300) vs Lenovo ThinkSystem SR680a V4
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 ProLiant Compute XD685 (HGX B300) | Lenovo ThinkSystem SR680a V4 |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | HPE | Lenovo |
| Part number | S6Y07A | 7DMK |
| Form factor | rack | rack |
| Released | 2025 | — |
| Accelerator | 8x B300 | 8x B300 |
| Aggregate memory | 2.1 TB | — |
| Aggregate bandwidth | 64.0 TB/s | — |
| System power | — | — |
| Interconnect | NVLink 5.0 / NVSwitch 4.0 across the HGX B300 baseboard; 4x FHHL PCIe Gen5 x16 slots for fabric, NIC or DPU | One NVIDIA HGX B300 SXM baseboard, which Lenovo pairs with fast interconnects between GPUs, CPUs and networking |
Rows shown in grey are identical between the two.
HPE 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 pageLenovo ThinkSystem SR680a V4
Lenovo's Blackwell Ultra machine, an 8U server developed in-house around eight NVIDIA HGX B300 SXM GPUs and two Intel Xeon 6700P processors reaching 86 cores at up to 350 W. Notably it is designed for air cooling, where most B300 machines in this catalogue are liquid cooled or need direct-to-chip plumbing, and it carries that with 21 hot-swap fans, six at the front for CPUs and memory and fifteen at the rear for drives and the GPU subsystem. Power is six or eight hot-swap supplies, either 3,200 W AC or 3,800 W high-voltage AC or DC, in N+1 or N+N redundancy. The chassis is 447 by 351 by 924 mm at up to 124.7 kg, the heaviest of Lenovo's 8U accelerator servers. Lenovo publishes no system power draw, no accelerator memory total and no system throughput figure; its per-GPU B300 table matches NVIDIA's own specification for the baseboard, which is linked here.
Vendor product page