By Patrick Kennedy
Publication Date: 2026-05-30 17:00:00
The ASUS XA NB3I-E12 is a huge server. Occupying 9U of rack space, it brings a cutting-edge NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra subsystem along with Intel Xeon processors and over 6.4Tbps of networking in a form factor that is relatively easy to integrate into data center racks. Today, we are taking a look at this NVIDIA HGX B300 8-GPU platform to see just how much it offers in an air-cooled chassis, and what makes it different from previous versions.
If you prefer to listen, we have a quick short above. Note that we got access to this server when in Taiwan a few weeks ago, so we have to say it is sponsored. We had our own conference room to take apart the server before putting it in the racks to test. Let us get to it.
ASUS XA NB3I-E12 Hardware Overview – Front Components
The system itself is giant, at 9U in size. This view shows that more than half of the height is dedicated to the heatsinks on NVIDIA B300 GPUs. Liquid-cooling makes a lot of sense for AI servers, but air-cooled GPUs can mean systems fit into existing racks and data centers. That is what ASUS is after here.
Next up is one of the major changes between the NVIDIA HGX B200 and HGX B300 platforms. Namely, the HGX B300 8 GPU baseboard has eight NVIDIA ConnectX-8 NICs onboard. Each of those provides 800Gbps XDR Infiniband links dedicated to each GPU, and so they need a way to…
