GIGABYTE has brought the impressive compute and I/O capabilities of AMD EPYC to a new single socket tower server that can support four GPGPU cards, making it ideal for SOHO, SME, universities or other organizations requiring a cost effective, high performance engine for simulation, machine learning or other AI, HPC or data processing workloads. VGA graphics cards may also be installed instead, turning the W291-Z00 into a powerful tool for CAD modeling or 3D rendering.
The W291-Z00 is built around GIGABYTE’s MZ01-CE1 server motherboard, supporting a single AMD EPYC 7000 series processor with up to 32 cores and 64 threads, making it great for applications that are optimized for multi-threading. The motherboard features 8 x DIMM slots to support the EPYC’s 8 memory channels, for a total capacity of 1,024GB of DDR4 memory.
According to the company, the highlight of the W291-Z00 is the ability to support up to four active VGA or passive GPGPU cards, especially compared with competing solutions that require a dual socket CPU platform to support a similar number of cards. Therefore, the W291-Z00 offers an excellent value proposition to customers looking for a non-rackmount standalone server that still can offer dense GPU capacity and compute power. GPUs supported by the W291-Z00 will include the Tesla V100 or Radeon MI25 for machine learning workloads, as well as NVIDIA’s Quadro, GeForce & Titan series VGA cards, offering a variety of workload possibilities for this system.
For high capacity storage, the front of the W291-Z00 features four hot-swappable drive bays to install 3.5” or 2.5” SATA or SAS HDD / SSD drives. Internally, the W291-Z00 also features an onboard M.2 slot for a high speed flash storage drive. Additional M.2 drives for flash storage may be installed via an M.2 riser card (such as GIGABYTE’s CMT2014, CMT4032 or CMT4034) from one of W291-Z00’s five expansion slots (four PCIe Gen3 x16 slots and one PCIe Gen3 x8 slot).
The W291-Z00 also features many other server class reliability and maintenance features common across GIGABYTE’s rackmount server products, including an Aspeed AST2500 baseboard management controller for remote management. System cooling is provided by four powerful internal fans: three 120x38mm fans and one 92x25mm fan. Fan speed can be adjusted via GIGABYTE’s console management UI according to the type of GPU card installed: full speed for passive-cooled GPGPU cards, or reduced speed when active cooled VGA cards are installed, which also reduces system noise when the tower server might be needed to operate in an office environment. The W291-Z00 would even be ideal to be used with a water cooling system for even quieter operation. And to ensure the system remains reliable and stable even when running with a full load of GPGPU cards, the tower server includes dual redundant 1600W Platinum power supply units.
