Lenovo ThinkSystem SR780a V3 (HGX B200) vs Penguin Solutions Altus XE4318GTS-DTC
Both are built on the NVIDIA HGX B200 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 | Lenovo ThinkSystem SR780a V3 (HGX B200) | Penguin Solutions Altus XE4318GTS-DTC |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Lenovo | Penguin Solutions |
| Part number | 7DJ5 | Altus XE4318GTS-DTC |
| Form factor | rack | rack |
| Released | — | — |
| Accelerator | 8x B200 | 8x B200 |
| Aggregate memory | — | — |
| Aggregate bandwidth | — | — |
| System power | — | — |
| Interconnect | One NVIDIA HGX B200 8-GPU liquid-cooled baseboard at 1000 W per accelerator, with the NVLink switches water-cooled alongside the GPUs and CPUs | Penguin publishes no interconnect figure; expansion is 8x PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL and 4x PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL double-width |
Rows shown in grey are identical between the two.
Lenovo ThinkSystem SR780a V3 (HGX B200)
The Blackwell configuration of Lenovo's SR780a V3, ordered under base feature code C695 and built on a ThinkSystem NVIDIA HGX B200 180GB eight-GPU liquid-cooled board rated at 1000 W per accelerator, against 700 W for the Hopper board in the same chassis. That is the case for the design: sixth generation Lenovo Neptune water cooling on four loops takes CPUs, GPUs and NVLink switches, removing up to 75 percent of the heat in warm water, and eight kilowatt-class accelerators still fit in 5U where the air-cooled machines in this catalogue need 8U or 10U. The chassis is 447 by 219 by 942 mm at up to 92 kg, hosted by two fifth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors at 56 cores and 350 W, with eight hot-swap supplies in N+N redundancy. Lenovo publishes no system power draw, no accelerator memory total and no system-level throughput; the linked HGX B200 entry carries NVIDIA's figures.
Vendor product pagePenguin Solutions Altus XE4318GTS-DTC
The Penguin Solutions Altus XE4318GTS-DTC is a 4U GPU server carrying eight NVIDIA HGX B200 SXM modules of 180 GB each, hosted by AMD EPYC 9005/9004 Series processors with 8x PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL and 4x PCIe Gen5 x16 FHHL double-width. The DTC suffix marks Penguin's direct-to-chip liquid cooling, which is what folds an eight-accelerator Blackwell baseboard into 4U where the air-cooled equivalent needs 8U. 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