Blackwell Ultra: Asus wants to bring Nvidia's priciest board into a desktop PC
Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra is actually intended for AI servers. However, Asus is also planning a desktop workstation with it.
(Image: Asus)
Asus presents the ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3 system. This is the first time a major PC manufacturer has brought one of Nvidia's Grace boards into a desktop case. Asus goes straight to the point and uses Nvidia's most expensive GB300 board with Blackwell Ultra.
Nvidia's well-known ARM processor Grace with 72 CPU cores of the Neoverse V2 type sits on a GB300 board. Next to it sits a Blackwell Ultra, Nvidia's fastest accelerator expansion stage with 288 GByte High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM3e) and a transfer rate of 8 TByte/s. The system also has access to 496 GB of LPDDR5X. It has a total of 784 GB of RAM.
In addition to the CPU and GPU, the board also features a ConnectX-8 network processor, called SuperNIC (Network Interface Card) by Nvidia. It basically achieves 800 GByte/s – and may be useful for connecting several ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3s.
(Image:Â Asus)
AI workstation
The focus is on training AI models. Provided the data fits into the memory, the GB300 should be one of the fastest training systems within a workstation. However, a GB300 also requires a lot of power – Nvidia designs the board for up to 1400 watts.
Asus pre-installs Nvidia's Ubuntu-based operating system DGX OS on an SSD. In principle, games also run on a GB300. However, because Nvidia restricts the 3D capabilities of the server GPUs, the system is not particularly suitable for this.
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Design may still change
So far, Nvidia has only given a rough market launch date for the GB300 in the second half of 2025, which is why Asus cannot yet give an availability date or price. However, costs in excess of 100,000 euros would not come as a surprise.
When asked, an Asus spokesperson confirmed to heise online that the design could still change. The gray housing is already the second version shown publicly. The previous black version with optical drive is obsolete.
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