It’s not just size, it’s also standoff positions. They really need to explicitly, or also, list the specific form factors the case is intended to support. Just saying “The extended chassis supports E-ATX motherboards” isn’t really enough. SSI-EEB (and SSI-CEB and sometimes SSI-EATX) has different standoff positions than EATX. The Twitchcon pictures that show a bit more of a top-down view than the ones in the store don’t seem to have as many standoff locations as my Supermicro servers, I’m not sure they’d support SSI-EEB. @rachit-45Drives?
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This is exactly what I need to know. “E-ATX” is not a real standard so it’s just confusing. Will it fit a 12”x13.2” board? Or is it something else?
What a bummer, waited months for this to find out the price is around double a normal case. Not willing to pay that price and my motherboard I already have won’t fit in your standard case, so I will have to stick with a two server solution.
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The price of the Beast isn’t twice that of the HL15v2.
Hl15v2 Chassis&PSU ~$1200 | Beast Chassis&PSU ~$1800
Hl15v2 w/ROMED82T ~$2300 | Beast w/RAMED82T ~$2900
I get $600 more, not twice. For that you get something like 22 liters additional build volume, a set of 140mm Noctua fans, and a direct wired backplane for 8 SSDs.
Is it worth it? That depends on your use case and budget. Can you get something similar in some specs made of flimsier metal and requiring trays off of AliExpress or used off of eBay for less? sure. But don’t overexaggerate.
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Last response on this, it is true I am exaggerating a bit, if I factor in the differences between the two you still see $600, so $300 for a PSU I don’t need. That would still be $1590 for a case if they offered it without a PSU, which they don’t. So it is almost double what I was expecting to pay and I now have a 1000w or 1200w PSU in a closet collecting dust.
You can buy a Strix Halo mini PC with 128gb of RAM for less than a single RTX5090. To me it isn’t worth getting GPUs for LLMs any longer, they are impossible to get and cost a fortune. So the height is a non-factor.
This leaves the build volume, which I can get at a lot less, even without getting crummy cases off AliExpress and eBay. Then put the saving towards an AI mini PC. I was expecting to pay around $1100 for one of these, which IMO is already a lot of money for a computer case. But to get one of these in my hands it is $1800. Maybe if I was starting fresh on a new build I would think about it, but that is not the case, I already have the hardware, just need a new way to store it in my rack.
At this point I am just venting so I am going to move on with my life. Just frustrated I waited this long for this disappointment, it is likely the same feeling I will feel when Stranger Things Season 5 comes out.
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Hi @DigitalGarden @Hi-Desert the chassis does have a sufficient number of mounting points to securely support the SSI-EEB board and keep it stable once installed.
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I understand some of the frustration, but I think it was clear from the release of the HL15 v1 that 45HL offers a premium-priced product. Whether any individual feels they are getting a premium built and spec’d product depends on their priorities. I certainly wouldn’t have expected the Beast sans PSU to cost $100 more than the HL15 v2 sans PSU. Beyond the tangible differences, there may be more intangibles in the pricing such as rlatively lower expected ongoing demand and tariff uncertainty. If the issue was only the PSU, you could probably contact the support email and my guess is you could probably work out knocking off a couple hundred dollars and get them to not include a PSU. I’m not sure why that option isn’t offered directly in the store. But that would only get it down to $1600 or so.
The AI mini PCs look great with the variable unified GPU/CPU RAM partitioning, but the GPUs are slower. Comparing them to the Beast is unfair, they won’t hold 15x HDDs and 8x SSDs. It sounds like you don’t really need the storage part of the Beast and would be better off with a non-storage focused case anyway.
Although there’s no negative emotions, at 27 inches deep and 66 pounds empty, I’m a bit less interested in adding one to my rack personally than pre-release, but that’s just me. I do like some of the other design decisions they made.
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I know I said I wasn’t going to reply but…
I wasn’t comparing the beast to the AI machine, I was saying that these affordable AI machines that recently came out made the height a non-issue for me. Building an AI machine with 128gb of VRAM in the beast would easily run over $12k, if you could even get ahold of 4xRTX5090s. That machine also would need way more power than a 1000w PSU. So comparing a $12k super machine that consumes 2000w of power to a $2k machine that consumes 150w of power isn’t apples to apples. I would have to find a new wife to build out my dream AI machine.
I actually need something that can hold 12 SAS disks. I started with a Dell R730XD in my homelab(actually have multiple R730XD + a power vault), but the power bills were hard for me to explain to my wife. So now the disks are all in an unplugged machine or a pile of junk Rosewill case that I was hoping to replace with the Beast but at $1800, I just can’t do it. I will likely have to drop a couple disks and go with a 10 disk chassis or just live with the garbage Rosewill cases HDD mounting mechanism. My OCD makes this hard to do 
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Hi @jrhenderson,
We do not have any plans of offering the Chassis & Backplane option as of now, because of the wiring architecture we have in the beast is a little complicated. However, if you want a unit without the PSU, kindly send me an email at info@45homelab.com, and i will arrange a custom order for you.
Hi @taylorjonl
I appreciate your feedback, and I will share this with our R&D team. and Hopefully, we will come up with a different PSU to offer.
I’m curious: Why direct wired instead of backplanes?
Kevin
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It is a backplane. What they mean by “direct wired” is that each drive has it’s own channel to the controller. There are SFF-8643 connectors on the backplanes that handle four SATA/SAS channels each, not there is necessarily a single physical cable for each drive.
The distinction they are trying to make is that many vendors use some sort of multiplexing to achieve high drive density. 45Drives even used to do this with their very first storage pods for Backblaze. I have Supermicro Servers that do this; 16 drive bays, but only two 4-channel connectors from the backplane, etc. At one point 45Drives also used a type of HBA from Highpoint that did multiplexing as the cheaper option on their 30/45/60 drive units. So the HBA multiplexed the communication (IIRC) of groups of four drives. So, you could connect 40 drives to the HBA, but it had 10 mux chips, and each group of four drives would share bandwidth, which could be a real impact to heavy or non-distributed workloads.
A spinning HDD won’t saturate a 3 gbps link, so running two drives over a 6 gbps link, theoretically, should be fine. But in practice there are driver and compatibility issues doing this. The multiplexing does become a bottleneck once you want to run SAS or SATA SSDs, or dual actuator HDDs, which can saturate a single 6gbps link, in a drive bay.
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Great explanation. Thank you. When I read “direct wired” I was thinking of the wiring in my older Q30.
Kevin
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Would it be possible to get a write up of the differences between the ASRock and ASUS variants? And why would someone pick one over the other, given the ASUS variant costs approximately an additional $400CAD (at the time of writing).
Also, looking at the manual for the Beast, the top-down picture showcasing the SSD cage splits the SSDs 2-4-2. Is this for technical reasons, or simply done this way to allow the screw?
I’m currently in the market to upgrade my R730 maxed out with 8 HDDs. Wondering if the Beast gives me better “future proofing” (is this a lie we keep telling ourselves? haha) over the HL15.
Thank you.
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In general I wouldn’t say the Beast is about “future proofing”, although that may depend on knowns and unknowns about your workload. The main point of the Beast is to support larger physical form factor motherboards and GPUs than the HL15, and it would give you dedicated 8 bays for 2.5-in 7mm (mostly) SATA SSDs. There’s no technology in the chassis, such as a tri-mode backplane, that is going to future-proof you between the two.
- Do you need, or think you’ll need, EATX/XL-ATX/SSI-EEB motherboards? Then you need the Beast.
- Do you need, or think you’ll need, GPUs (incl. their top or end power connectors) longer than about 10.5 inches or taller than about 6 inches? Then you need the Beast.
- Do you need to have SATA SSDs in addition to 15 HDDs? Then this is easier in the Beast, (but can be McGyvered in the HL15).
It’s not in table form, or written to justify the additional cost, but;
- The Asrock RomeD8-2T motherboard is a server-type motherboard. That means it uses a CPU that supports lots of PCIE lanes, and has server-focused features like remote management through IPMI. But it is “prior generation” Epyc. For the CPUs offered on the configurator, you would have to upgrade to the Epyc 7452 to match the raw compute of the Ryzen 9 7950X, an additional $943 CAD. There are CPUs for the SP3 socket that would take you higher, but SP3 is not the flagship socket and new development for it has mostly ceased. This board can support more RAM–up to 2 TB–if your workload requires that, and that can be ECC RAM, which some people get their knickers in a twist about as a requirement.
- The Asus ProArt X870E-Creator motherboard is a consumer-type motherboard. That means it uses a CPU that supports less PCIE lanes, and does not have server-targeted features like remote management through IPMI. But it is the current generation AMD Ryzen AM5 consumer CPU socket. X870E is the current high end chipset, so it supports more recent tech like PCIe 5, DDR 5, USB 4, etc. As the name implies, it is targeted at creators, who tend to pair high end CPUs with high end GPUs and are more concerned with NVMe than PBs of local storage. The Ryzen 9 7950X is a higher-end CPU for the AM5 socket, which AMD is still releasing CPUs for. The Ryzen chips will draw less power (require less cooling) than Epyc, and in the case of the 7950X can also be overclocked if that’s you’re thing. With current capacities, you can theoretically get 256GB RAM into the four slots, but getting four sticks of 64 GB DDR5 to play nicely together at higher speeds can be challenging. The board paired with the 7950X should support RAM with side-band ECC (ie, a level beyond the on-die ECC in the DDR5 spec), but the RAM offered in the configurator for the X870E board is non-ECC, so you would need to source your own DDR5 ECC RAM if you need full ECC support. Because this motherboard has less on-board SATA, it comes with a different HBA for the pre-built; a 9305-24i vs a 9400-16i. Older generation, but more channels. But the 9305 is only PCIE 3. 8x lanes of PCIE 3 (the edge connector for the card) is only something like half the bandwidth of 24x channels of SATA 6gbps, so fully loaded, a Beast could experience some IO bottlenecks in this configuration.
Asus motherboards have a reputation for being overpriced, but here between the two builds, you’re paying for a different feature set focus, not any one single specific “upgrade”.
Beast vs HL15 and RomeD8-2T vs Asus X870E vs self-built really depends on your use case.
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Is there any plans to have a cage replacement for the SSD backplane so we could use some 15mm SSDs in that area? Before I purchase, I wanted to ask because it influences which machine if any will work. Use case here is some 3.5” spinners in the front, but then I have an array of 15mm SSDs (as I imagine many people have,) which I have to find spots for. I can put them in the 3.5” lanes, but I am out of room with the size of my spinner array, so need some extra spots in the case to use. The cage for the SSD area looks like it could easily be made to have 2x15mm SSDs on the two ends, with 7.5mm in the middle. Is this an add-on that could be considered? Alternatively, is there any add-on bracket for the 2.0 so we can add a few 15mm SSDs outside the main front backplane? Theres some community 3d prints, but is strange that the option isn’t available in the store.
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HI @derringer
I appreciate your feedback. And no, we do not have any plans for this as of yet, but I will share this feedback with our R&D team to look into this.
Not sure what else is going on in your build. The downside of the “official” 3D printed brackets and remixes is they go over the IO shield area, blocking airflow and potentially being physically in conflict with an active CPU cooler taking up some of the same space. I assume you saw this thread; 15mm SSD Mounting Bracket?.
Not sure how big your “array” of SSDs is, but one option for the HL15 would be to mount them in the PCIE slot space;
If you went with the Beast, you could look at non-45HL-specific SSD brackets like this;
or the docks with backplanes from IcyDock and StarTech, some of which accommodate 15mm SSDs.
Very much appreciate the in-depth reply. Thank you.
The product page shows the stock fans as “Noctua NF-A14 PWM - 1ft: 62db - 3ft: 56db - ambient 36db”. This would seem very loud. But looking at the Noctua product page, the max dB(A) is only listed at 24.6.
Would someone please clarify this?
Thank you.