Gigabyte and CoolIT partner for liquid cooled servers

Gigabyte Technology isn’t the first name that comes to mind in data-center hardware. It’s better known as a consumer player, but it is a significant server player none the less, making server motherboards on par with other top names like Supermicro.

Now the company has teamed with CoolIT Systems to provide two high-density servers equipped with liquid-cooling technology.

The servers, H262-ZL0 and H262-ZL2, are equipped with direct liquid cooling for CPUs designed to support the high-performing but super-hot 280 watt AMD EPYC 7003 (Milan) processors.

The servers, based on the company’s H262-Z6x family of air-cooled servers, are hyperconverged and very dense, targeting HPC, HCI, in-memory-computing, and scientific-research markets. They both pack four nodes with two sockets each and eight DIMM slots per node in a 2U form factor. 

Using air cooling, a H262 server fully populated with memory and 24 SSD drives is limited to 200-Watt CPU power. Air cooling is limited compared to water cooling, which can absorb up to 3,000 times more heat. Direct liquid cooling means customers can now use the top of the AMD EPYC line at 280 Watt.

In a statement, Gigabyte CEO Alan Chen said its customers have asked for liquid-cooled servers, and described the first two are just the “first wave of servers with direct liquid-cooling kits.”

Heat from the CPUs in the H262-ZL0 is absorbed by cold plates and carried away by a stream of liquid flowing through a housing on top of the plates. The liquid is pumped away, cooled, and recirculated. The server relies on air cooling for the rest of the system, such as memory.

The H262-CL2 adds additional cold plates to cool its memory modules as well as a Mellanox ConnectX-6 DPU adapter.

The new servers are available from Gigabyte now.