Hetzner shows Special AM5 Board with 90° Rotated Socket
Why Hacker News recommends it
Pointed to as a look at Hetzner's unusual semi-custom server hardware and cooling.
What it is
Der8auer tours Hetzner's test lab and shows a custom AM5 server motherboard with the CPU socket rotated 90 degrees, built for rack airflow in their AX52 servers.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2023 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends jsheard · 2024-02 · on “Hetzner GPU Server”
There's some videos out there showing off their custom motherboards, it's an odd mixture of standard-ish consumer ATX but stripped down to the absolute bare essentials and with some components rearranged for better airflow in racks chassis they also build themselves: [this video] Another video showing the custom racks and other infrastructure: [LINK]
Recommends jsheard · 2025-11 · on “A day at Hetzner Online in the Falkenstein data center”
Der8auer did some similar videos a few years ago, but in English: [LINK] [this video] The second is especially interesting as it demonstrates Hetzner's unique semi-custom hardware.
Cites thejosh · 2023-07 · on “Fly.io Postgres cluster down for 3 days, no word from them about it”
Hetzner also do some crazy-cool stuff, especially around the 7950X3D, cooling, AM5 etc. ( [this video] ). They also do some amazing stuff with ARM (their cloud offering is really solid for this).
Cites dist-epoch · 2024-02 · on “Hetzner GPU Server”
Hetzner is buying ASUS consumer AM5 motherboards, but with the whole CPU + memory block rotated so that the memory sticks are horizontal instead of vertical for better airflow: [this video]