Gigabyte G383-R80-AAP1 AMD Instinct MI300A Server Review – ServeTheHome

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 AMD Instinct MI300A 6

Sometimes, you just get to take apart cool servers. A few months ago They Let Me Bring a Camera Into a Top Classified US Supercomputer, El Capitan. That top-end supercomputer uses AMD Instinct MI300A APUs, combining CPU and GPU cores from AMD’s EPYC and Instinct lines along with HBM3 memory to make perhaps the fastest APU around. The GIGABYTE G383-R80-AAP1 takes four of those MI300A APUs and puts them into a system that you can buy and run without having to buy a cluster with tens of thousands of nodes. In the process, this is a very neat server that we wanted to review.

For this one, we have a short video that you can find here:

As a quick note, we looked at this system earlier this year in Taiwan so we have to say this is sponsored. Let us get into the system.

GIGABYTE G383-R80-AAP1 External Hardware Overview

The system comes in a really neat form factor at 3U and 950mm (around 37.4in) deep. If you were wondering, those handles come in handy when moving the server.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front Angle 1

The front of the server has cooling on the bottom and then storage and I/O on the top 1U.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front

Taking a look at the cooling, we can see that the fans occupy the bottom 2U portion of the chassis and are designed to draw cool air into the APU heatsinks.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front Fans

Storage is provisioned through eight 2.5″ NVMe drive bays.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front Storage

Here is a quick look at the drive backplane which is cabled for each x4 drive.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 NVMe Backplane

The other main feature is the front I/O. Here we have two 10GbE NIC ports via a Broadcom BCM57416.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front IO

The front I/O board is really neat in how it is designed with M.2 storage and more. This area also has the USB ports, VGA, and management LAN port.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Front IO Board

The rear is quite far away and has something a bit unexpected.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 Rear Overview

There are four 3kW PSUs. Compared to the big 8x GPU servers, this is a relatively lower power machine which is fun to think about.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 3kW PSU Hot Swap

The rest of the rear is a series of PCIe Gen5 x16 slots. These are arranged in four dual width and four single width slots.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 PCIe Slots 1

These are cabled into the machine on small PCIe boards.

GIGABYTE G383 R80 AAP1 PCIe Slots 2

Next, let us get inside the server to see how it works.