HPE ProLiant Compute XD685 (HGX H200) vs Penguin Solutions Relion XE5318GTS

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

SpecificationHPE ProLiant Compute XD685 (HGX H200)Penguin Solutions Relion XE5318GTS
VendorHPEPenguin Solutions
Part numberRelion XE5318GTS
Form factorrackrack
Released2025
Accelerator8x H2008x H200
Aggregate memory1.1 TB
Aggregate bandwidth38.4 TB/s
System power
InterconnectNVLink 4.0 / NVSwitch 3.0 across the HGX H200 baseboard; 4x FHHL PCIe Gen5 x16 slots for fabric, NIC or DPUPenguin publishes no interconnect figure; expansion is 12x PCIe Gen5 x16 low profile and 1x PCIe Gen4 x16 low profile

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 page

Penguin Solutions Relion XE5318GTS

The Penguin Solutions Relion XE5318GTS is a 5U GPU server carrying eight NVIDIA HGX H200 SXM5 modules of 141 GB each, hosted by 5th and 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with 12x PCIe Gen5 x16 low profile and 1x PCIe Gen4 x16 low profile. The Intel-hosted Hopper machine, and the most expansion-heavy server in the range with thirteen slots. 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