Gigabyte R284-A92-AAL1: A Reliable 2U Rack Server For Intel Xeon 6900 Series
Over the past two months of using this server for carrying out fresh Xeon 6980P "Granite Rapids" benchmarks on Phoronix, it has been featured in a number of articles. There are more articles coming too relying on this server but some of them over the past two months included:
- Intel Xeon 6980P "Granite Rapids" Linux Performance One Year Later
- Revisiting DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM-8800 Performance With Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids"
- The Massive AI Performance Benefit With AMX On Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids"
- An Early Look At Linux 6.18 Performance With Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids
- Revisiting The SNC3 vs. HEX Mode Performance With Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids
- Intel Xeon 6 Performance Feature Benchmarks: Latency Optimized Mode
Throughout all of this benchmarking of different areas and capabilities of Granite Rapids, the Gigabyte R284-A92-AAL1 has worked without fault. From DDR5-6400 DIMMs to MRDIMMs, stressing the Granite Rapids CPUs with plenty of AMX workloads, and a lot of tinkering, this server platform has worked out very well. Especially when it came to swapping memory and not having all the worries when originally testing on the AvenueCity reference platform from Intel that was one of their least dependable reference servers in the two decades of hardware testing at Phoronix.
For some thermal and power numbers, I also ran Phoronix monitoring while the Xeon 6980P server was enduring several hours of AI workloads, database workloads, and other HPC benchmarks.
The Xeon 6980P was successfully running up to its 3.9GHz maximum turbo frequency and all-core 3.2GHz turbo frequency throughout the demanding workloads like CPU-based AI inferencing with AMX via OpenVINO and Llama.cpp. CPU0 during this testing was at 59 degrees on average under load with the air cooling and a peak of 70 degrees.
Monitoring other exposed system sensors also showed no thermal troubles in any of the other testing -- in this round of dedicated testing or in any of the other prior testing for the different articles.
This Intel dual Xeon 6980P load-out with 24 x MRDIMM-8800 modules and one NVMe SSD saw the R284-A92-AAL1 have an overall wall power of up to 1686 Watts but typically around 1080 Watts during this several hours of different benchmarks.
👁 Giga Computing R284-A92-AAL1
Overall this Gigabyte R284-A92-AAL1 2U rack server has worked out very well in all of my testing now the past two months. Plus more ongoing benchmarking of the Intel Granite Rapids Xeon 6980P processors with different compilers, new Linux kernel benchmarks, and other different software/hardware comparisons at Phoronix. Should anything come up in the future benchmarks, I'll be sure to update this article but so far the experience has proven very reliable with this Gigabyte server and its MA94-FS0 motherboard. Thanks to Giga Computing for supplying this rack server as a review sample and allowing it to be used for long-term Granite Rapids benchmarking at Phoronix.
Those wishing to learn more about this Xeon 69000 series rack server can do so at Gigabyte.com.
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