Inside Our Latest Project: Building 40 Modular Open-Frame Systems for Advanced Workloads

Ethan Malone • October 14, 2025

Custom open-frame builds lined up and ready for testing.

Our Santa Clara team is wrapping up production on 40 custom open-frame systems ordered by one of our local customers. In this batch of systems, there are 10 unique CPU and motherboard configurations in which 4 of each are produced. These computers are all designed for flexibility, ease of swapping GPUs, and long-term operation.

As more organizations scale their AI training and HPC workloads, modular solutions such as open-frame test benches are a popular option, since they enable faster thermal evaluation and benchmarking compared to traditional tower or rackmount systems.

After testing multiple candidates for our choice of open-frame chassis to be used in this project, our technicians eventually landed on the EDIY PC Test Bench Open Air ATX Case for its scalability and build quality meeting our standards.

Each system is equipped with a Noctua NH-L9x65 low-profile cooler per our customer's request, with the exception of the Core Ultra 7 and 9 systems, where our technicians opted for the NH-D12L dual-tower cooler for additional thermal headroom. Each system was fitted with a 1000W power supply and either 64GB or 96GB of Corsair DDR5 memory based on the customer's request.

Despite the layout differing from our usual desktop towers and rackmount servers, cable management was very simple. Most components mount directly to the board these days, and with the freedom of open-frame, the overall build process has been coming along efficiently.

Production on these systems is expected to conclude within the next two weeks, with the first half of the systems being completed early this week and the remainder scheduled for the following week. The main limitation has been receiving all of the necessary components, such as the chassis, Noctua coolers, and some of the older CPUs. Sourcing certain legacy parts, particularly older Intel models that the customer requested, ended up being the biggest slowdown overall. With all remaining components now in hand, assembly and testing are moving quickly.

Build Matrix (10 Configurations)