The PowerEdge R750xa is Dell's accelerator-optimised sibling to the mainstream R750. Where the standard chassis prioritises drive bays, the xa reallocates internal volume to GPU real estate: four single-width 150 W or four double-width 300 W cards mount in the front of the chassis, in the cool air path, with a further two single-width 75 W slots available at the rear. Eight PCIe Gen4 slots are available in total, in configurations of up to six x16 plus two x8, which is what makes it practical to pair four accelerators with high-speed fabric adapters and NVMe storage without contention on the root complex.
Compute comes from one or two 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Ice Lake-SP), scaling to 40 cores per socket. Each processor presents eight memory channels populated across 32 DDR4 DIMM slots running at up to 3200 MT/s registered ECC modules only. Practical ceilings are 2 TB with RDIMMs and 4 TB with LRDIMMs, and up to 16 slots can instead take Intel Persistent Memory 200 series for a maximum of 8 TB when a workload benefits from large, byte-addressable capacity. Populating one DIMM per channel per socket is the usual starting point for GPU work, since bandwidth to the host matters more than raw capacity when feeding accelerators.
Storage is deliberately compact: up to eight 2.5-inch SAS, SATA or NVMe bays at the front (up to 122.88 TB), or six direct-attach NVMe SSDs where the lowest latency path to the CPU is required. Internal controller choices span PERC H745, H755, H755N (NVMe RAID), H345, the HBA355i pass-through for software-defined storage, and S150. External expansion is handled by PERC H840 or HBA355e. The BOSS-S2 module carries two 240 GB or 480 GB M.2 SSDs in hardware RAID 1 as a dedicated boot device, the sensible way to install ESXi or a Linux root filesystem without consuming a data bay.
Supported platforms include VMware ESXi, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Canonical Ubuntu Server LTS, Citrix Hypervisor and Windows Server with Hyper-V. The GPU layout suits vGPU brokering, container-based training clusters and HPC nodes equally well. Power comes from 1400 W or 2400 W Platinum, or 1800 W and 2800 W Titanium supplies in hot-plug redundant pairs, size these against your accelerator loadout, since four 300 W cards plus two 40-core CPUs move the platform firmly into the upper tiers. Cooling is air by default with up to six hot-plug high-performance GOLD fans, and direct liquid cooling to the processors is available for dense or thermally constrained racks.
Buying the R750xa refurbished is particularly rational because the chassis, not the silicon inside it, is the scarce part. GPU-capable 2U platforms with front-mounted double-width slots, Gen4 lanes and the power headroom to match were expensive when new and remain fully relevant for Ampere-generation and later PCIe accelerators. The Ice Lake platform delivers PCIe Gen4 end to end, which is the specification that actually governs accelerator throughput; acquiring that at secondary-market pricing frees budget for the GPUs and NVMe that determine performance. iDRAC9 with the OpenManage suite means the machine slots into existing Dell estates with no change to your monitoring, firmware baselining or Ansible workflows.
Each system is built to your specification rather than sold as a fixed bundle. Specify CPU model and count, DIMM type and population, backplane and drive selection, RAID or HBA controller, BOSS-S2 boot module, GPU configuration, OCP 3.0 and PCIe network adapters, PSU rating and rails. Systems are tested under load, firmware is brought to a current baseline and the unit is shipped configured as ordered.
