Supermicro's DGX Station Is a Workstation That Racks Like a Server

Supermicro's Super AI Station (ARS-511GD-NB-LCC) is the first DGX Station system to ship with an 80 PLUS Titanium-rated 1600W power supply — and the only one that can be rack-mounted as a 5U server. Grace Kim takes you through the numbers and the chassis.

The system is NVIDIA's DGX Station concept made metal: server-grade Grace Blackwell GB300 hardware squeezed into a desk-side box for local AI work. Every vendor designs its own enclosure. Supermicro, true to its server heritage, built a convertible chassis — desktop tower or racked 5U appliance, your call.

What's inside?

The spec sheet reads like a compact data-center node:

• CPU: NVIDIA Grace 72-core Neoverse V2 (72C/72T)
• GPU: NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra (a compute accelerator, not a display GPU)
• Memory: 496GB LPDDR5X at 396GB/s on the CPU side; 252GB HBM3E at 7.1TB/s on the GPU side
• Storage: 2x M.2 2280 (PCIe Gen6 x4), 2x M.2 2280 (PCIe Gen5 x4)
• OS: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with NVIDIA AI Developer Tools
• Optional video card: NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell 2000/4000/6000 — Supermicro fitted an RTX PRO 2000 here
• PSU: 1600W, 80 PLUS Titanium

That Titanium rating is a genuine first. Other DGX Station systems crossing reviewers' labs carried Platinum units. The wattage is standardized by NVIDIA; the PSU model is not — and Supermicro used that freedom well.

Why the odd shape?

The convertible design drives everything. At 455mm tall, the tower is skinny enough to slide between rack posts. The trade-off is depth: 701mm, nearly 28 inches, in a 218 x 455 x 701mm (5U) envelope. It's shorter and far deeper than a typical PC workstation, and at 88lb it needs a pair of attached feet to stand as a tower.

Top and bottom panels expose rackmount rail points — visible even in workstation mode. The top pops off entirely; it carries no ventilation, because vented tops don't work in a rack.

Cooling is liquid, as on all DGX Stations, with 1600 watts of hardware to manage. Supermicro mounts an externally accessible coolant tank near the top, complete with a liquid-level indicator and fill/drain ports. The system ships fully pre-built and needs minimal maintenance, so the tank looks like a data-center holdover. Practical either way.

Airflow dominates the front panel. Nearly every square millimeter pulls air in. The exception: a small front I/O panel — a first for a DGX Station, though its server roots show. You get two 5Gbps USB-A ports where rival vendors fit 10Gbps USB-A and USB-C, plus a power button (with a red/blue status LED), a reset button, and a drive activity LED. A locked cage beside it hides the service tag and could theoretically house front-panel storage.

What does the rear offer?

The back panel is standardized — NVIDIA supplies the motherboards — so Supermicro's layout matches other vendors. It is not a standard EEB/E-ATX chassis: the PSU sits on its own side, the motherboard is installed upside-down, and PCIe brackets sit at the top.

Networking is the highlight. Two QSFP112 ports driven by NVIDIA's ConnectX-8 SuperNIC each deliver 400Gbps, and testing has pushed the NIC to 800Gbps in certain circumstances. These ports are the primary links to high-speed storage or other DGX Station systems, though their capabilities are somewhat complex because the SuperNIC does heavy lifting beyond networking.

For mundane traffic there's a 10GbE RJ45 port (Marvell controller) plus a 1GbE management port for the BMC, handled by OpenBMC with an HTML5 iKVM. The topology is unusual: the Marvell 10Gbase-T controller hangs off the ConnectX-8's built-in PCIe switch, not the CPU directly.

Four rear USB-A ports run at 10Gbps — the fastest on the system. No USB-C anywhere, since NVIDIA's board design omits it. A trio of 3.5mm jacks covers audio. Two BMC ports round it out: a micro-USB serial UART and a Mini DisplayPort for management, which matters because Blackwell Ultra offers no integrated display output — the BMC is your only out-of-the-box graphics.

One miss: no rear port labels at all. Par for a server, unhelpful for a workstation. Early systems sometimes skip such details, and this is an early unit.

Both side panels are plain steel, no windows — unlike Supermicro's plexiglass Computex demo — since a rackmount chassis can't rely on side ventilation.

The chassis interior, where this design truly diverges, is the next chapter of this review.