As gross sales of GPU-based AI accelerators stay as sturdy as ever, the immense demand for these playing cards has led to some server builders going off the overwhelmed path to be able to get the {hardware} they need at a lower cost. Whereas each NVIDIA and AMD provide official card configurations for servers, the correspondingly excessive worth of those playing cards makes them a major monetary outlay that some prospects both cannot afford, or do not need to pay.
As a substitute, these teams have been turning to purchasing up shopper graphics playing cards, which though they arrive with further limitations, are additionally a fraction of the price of a “correct” server card. And this week, ASRock has eliminated one other a kind of limitations for would-be AMD Radeon customers, with the introduction of a set of compact, passively-cooled Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT video playing cards which might be designed to go in servers.
With none doubts, ASRock’s AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Passive 24GB and AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT Passive 20GB AIBs are certainly graphics playing cards with 4 show outputs and primarily based on the Navi 31 graphics processor (with 6144 and 5376 stream processors, respectively), to allow them to output graphics and work each with video games {and professional} purposes. And with TGPs of 355W and 315W respectively, these playing cards aren’t underclocked in any method in comparison with conventional desktop playing cards. Nevertheless, not like a typical desktop card, the cooler on these playing cards is a dual-slot heatsink with none form of fan connected, which is supposed for use with high-airflow forced-air cooling.
All-told, ASRock’s passive cooler is fairly succesful, as properly; it isn’t only a easy aluminum heatsink. Beneath the fins, ASRock has gone with a vapor chamber and a number of warmth pipes to distribute warmth to the remainder of the sink. Even with forced-air cooling in racked servers, the heatsink itself nonetheless must be environment friendly to maintain a 300W+ card cool with solely a dual-slot cooler – and particularly so when upwards of 4 of those playing cards are put in side-by-side with one another. To make the boards much more server pleasant, these playing cards are outfitted with a 12V-2×6 energy connector, a primary for the Radeon RX 7900 collection, simplifying set up by lowering cable muddle.
Driving the demand for these playing cards specifically is their reminiscence configuration. With 24GB for the 7900 XTX and 20GB for the 7900 XT is half as a lot (or much less) reminiscence than might be discovered on AMD and NVIDIA’s high-end skilled and server playing cards, AMD is the one vendor providing shopper playing cards with this a lot reminiscence for lower than $1000. So for a memory-intensive AI inference cluster constructed on a low funds, the most cost effective 24GB card obtainable begins trying like a tantalizing possibility.
In any other case, ASRock’s Radeon RX 7900 Passive playing cards distinguish themselves from AMD’s formal skilled and server playing cards by what they’re not able to doing: particularly, distant skilled graphics or different purposes that want issues like GPU partitioning. These components look to be aimed toward one utility solely, synthetic intelligence, and are supposed to course of big quantities of knowledge. For this goal, their passive coolers will do the job and the shortage of ProViz or VDI-oriented drives make sure that AMD will go away these profitable markets for itself.
