HPE ProLiant Compute XD685 (HGX H200) vs Penguin Solutions Altus XE5318GTSv2
Both are built on the NVIDIA HGX H200 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 H200) | Penguin Solutions Altus XE5318GTSv2 |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | HPE | Penguin Solutions |
| Part number | — | Altus XE5318GTSv2 |
| Form factor | rack | rack |
| Released | 2025 | — |
| Accelerator | 8x H200 | 8x H200 |
| Aggregate memory | 1.1 TB | — |
| Aggregate bandwidth | 38.4 TB/s | — |
| System power | — | — |
| Interconnect | NVLink 4.0 / NVSwitch 3.0 across the HGX H200 baseboard; 4x FHHL PCIe Gen5 x16 slots for fabric, NIC or DPU | Penguin publishes no interconnect figure; expansion is 8x PCIe Gen5 x16 low profile and 4x PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL |
Rows shown in grey are identical between the two.
HPE ProLiant Compute XD685 (HGX H200)
The eight-way XD685 in its NVIDIA HGX H200 configuration, the only one of the four HPE offers in both air-cooled and liquid-cooled form: 6U for air with accelerator kit S3P89A, 5U for direct liquid cooling with S4X53A. Two fifth-generation AMD EPYC processors drive it, from 32 to 96 cores and 280 to 400 W, across 24 DIMM slots with twelve channels per socket and up to 6 TB of DDR5-6400. Storage is eight EDSFF NVMe E3.S drives, or twelve with a storage controller, plus RAID-1 M.2 boot. No chassis part number is recorded because two apply depending on cooling, S4Q28A for air and S4R96A for liquid. HPE publishes no system power draw for the XD685, only twelve 3,000 W Titanium supplies with ten deployable, so nothing is summed here; the compute figures are NVIDIA's for the HGX H200 baseboard rather than an HPE claim.
Vendor product pagePenguin Solutions Altus XE5318GTSv2
The Penguin Solutions Altus XE5318GTSv2 is a 5U GPU server carrying eight NVIDIA HGX H200 SXM5 modules of 141 GB each, hosted by AMD EPYC 9005/9004 Series processors with 8x PCIe Gen5 x16 low profile and 4x PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL. Penguin's AMD-hosted Hopper workhorse, air cooled in 5U. 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