Gigabyte, a Taiwanese maker of computers and PC components, has today decided to update its workstation PC lineup with the latest AMD Ryzen and Ryzen Threadripper processors. Aimed at professionals like engineers and scientists, the new workstation range of PCs carries up to 64 Zen cores and 128 threads.
Gigabyte's MC62-G40 motherboard serves as the base for all of its high-end workstation efforts. The new board has AMD's WRX80 chipset, representing the highest-end workstation chipset offered by AMD. It is manufactured to the enterprise SSI-CEB standard, commonly found in workstations and servers. With support for AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processors, it can host up to 64 cores and 128 threads, enabling eight-channel memory with eight DIMMs.
Those DIMMs support up to 2TB of total memory. In addition, the board carries six PCIe 4.0 x16 slots and one special PCIe 4.0 x16 slot that is wired to only x8 lanes electrically. There are two 10GbE, one 1GbE, and one MLAN connector as well. The board has four SATA III connectors, three SlimSAS, and two M.2 PCIe NVMe drives for storage. It also has six USB 3.2 Gen1 ports and one TPM module header.
Gigabyte has prepared two workstations in the standard desktop tower format, and one to fit inside a 1U rack space.
The desktop W771-Z00 is based on the aforementioned MC62-G40 motherboard. It has enough room and expansion options to fill out every feature of the board: a CPU with 64 cores and 128 threads, four dual-slot GPUs, and up to eight 3.5-inch hot-swap SSD/HDDs from two cages, where the default configuration includes one cage of four SSD/HDD bays. There are dual redundant 2000W (CRPS) power supplies to power everything, but you can upgrade the system with dual 2400W PSUs.
The W331-Z00 workstation is the smaller brother of the W771. It uses a motherboard with AMD's B550 chipset and can accommodate up to an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processor with 16 cores and 32 threads, while the memory can be filled out to 128GB of DDR4-3200 MHz DIMMs. It has four PCIe expansion slots, but it can be equipped with only one GPU wired for PCIe Gen4 x16 operation. It uses two slots for 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch storage expansion capabilities and has two 2280 M.2 PCIe NVMe slots on the board. It has built-in DASH remote management software as well to help you remotely manage this workstation. The whole system is powered by a 500 Watt PSU.
Last but not least, Gigabyte has also made a 1U server dedicated to GPU-centric workloads that also happen to need AMD Ryzen Threadripper processors. Based on the TRX40 chipset, the G182-C20 server can support third-gen Threadripper processors and has eight-channel memory that supports up to 256GB of system memory. Despite the size, it can fit two full-size graphics cards for GPU-accelerated workloads. The server has two 2.5-inch U.2 drive bays, two 10GbE Base-T (with support for NCSI) ports, and two redundant 1600W power supplies for power.
On the final note, Gigabyte has centered this workstation lineup on AMD Ryzen processors, however, the company claims that the W771 model can be configured with AMD EPYC server processors, as it is a very modular design. The company has not announced pricing or availability date for these workstations so far, but don't expect them to be cheap.
