Summary and Conclusion

Price

• Comino's GRANDO series of liquid-cooled workstation/server systems are built to order based on customer requirements, with all correspondence beginning with a quote request form found on the GRANDO RM page here.
• There are presently two series in the GRANDO RM lineup: the GRANDO RM V2-S and RM V2-L. The two differ by physical size, cooling capacity, and recommended hardware configurations.
• The GRANDO RM-S in the provided test configuration using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3995WX and four NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs costs €37,000 (incl. VAT) from Comino. It comes with rack-mounting equipment, personalized support, and expandable warranty as needed.

Let's address that €37,000 elephant in the room before anything else and agree that the average end user will never be purchasing the GRANDO RM-S in this configuration. In fact, such is the nature of this article covering what is essentially a scalable, fully configurable platform of systems that I shied away from a pros and cons list as it would not be practical in the absence of meaningful comparisons. I do not have much context in which to relate pricing and performance of this particular GRANDO RM-S. As such, I can only say that these are cool and quiet heavy-duty, high-performance systems meant to generate more value for customers than it costs to purchase one.

Over the course of this article, I acquired a deeper appreciation of how exactly programs scale with processor cores, with a high-end personal computer setup easily bested by the GRANDO RM-S, which was in turn outperformed by a legitimate supercomputer that is another case of scalable hardware taken to a new extreme. Given the first work PC cost ~€5,000, and the supercomputer was in the seven figures, it's also clear that the cost of a system is non-linear to the performance provided, with the GRANDO RM-S definitely closer to the supercomputer than the work PC, but costing a lot more, too.

Impressive is that despite the seemingly unoptimized radiator and fan assembly, the choice of components and custom water blocks utilized by Comino make for a highly efficient cooling system. At no point was the system loud, with the sound signature actually pleasant, akin to being around a relaxing water stream. It managed to easily cool a system with a rated combined TDP in excess of the GRANDO RM-S rating, and did so while barely having the fans ramp up from idle. The customized controller paired with the pump redundancy, integrated display, and separate powering and monitoring of the cooling system outside of the computer hardware are some of the aspects you get over typical consumer and prosumer-level system builds. The workstation-class hardware is the primary money sink here, and it comes with its own set of features, including the 256 GB ECC memory throughout, ~10 TB of super-fast storage, and a motherboard that has remote management options I would so love to always have. Comino adds to this with an easy-to-use monitoring program that helped me test the system while I was away, allowing for the longer tests without direct supervision. The liquid-cooled system still comes with easy-to-use quick disconnect fittings to swap out the GPUs in particular with something more to your liking while keeping you within the Comino ecosystem in a smart business move.

Whether or not this system is something you or your company, university, or research group might be interested in is ultimately a decision for you to make. I hope the information provided in this article helps this process, and let Comino know in the comments section what you think and would like to see from them next.