HPE ProLiant Compute XD685 (HGX B300) vs Penguin Solutions Relion XE4418GTS-DTC
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) | Penguin Solutions Relion XE4418GTS-DTC |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | HPE | Penguin Solutions |
| Part number | S6Y07A | Relion XE4418GTS-DTC |
| 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 | Penguin publishes no interconnect figure; expansion is 4x PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL double-width |
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 pagePenguin Solutions Relion XE4418GTS-DTC
The Penguin Solutions Relion XE4418GTS-DTC is a 4U GPU server carrying eight NVIDIA HGX B300 SXM6 modules of 288 GB each, hosted by Intel Xeon 6 (6700/6500 Series) processors with 4x PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL double-width. Direct-to-chip liquid cooling puts a full Blackwell Ultra baseboard in 4U, half the height of Penguin's air-cooled B300 machine. 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