Pro Quick-Start Guide

Safety first. Never open a power supply or work on mains wiring; use a licensed electrician. If you see coolant or smell burning, power off and unplug immediately. Your components’ manufacturer documentation takes precedence over this general guide.

01Unbox and inspect

Inspect the shipping carton before you open it. If it is crushed, punctured or wet, photograph it first.
Unpack on a clean, dry surface and keep all packaging. You may need it to ship a part back under the manufacturer’s warranty.
Check the system for visible damage: dents, loose parts rattling inside, or bent connectors.
Report shipping damage to [email protected] right away, with photos. Do not power on a system that looks damaged.
Let the system reach room temperature before you power it on if it arrived cold, so no condensation forms inside.

02Placement

These systems are heavy. Lift with two people, holding the chassis frame, not the panels or handles alone.
Leave at least 15 cm (6 in) of free space at the front, back and top. Four GPUs produce a lot of heat, so keep the room ventilated or air-conditioned.

03Power

A four-GPU workstation can draw 2,000 W or more under full load, which can exceed a standard 15 A / 120 V circuit. Check the rated power of your configuration and plan a dedicated 20 A circuit or 200–240 V supply where needed.
Systems with two power supplies need both connected, ideally to separate circuits.
Plug each power supply into its own outlet or PDU socket, not a shared power strip. Never use extension cords for a GPU system.
If you are not sure a circuit can carry the load, have a licensed electrician check it. Don’t modify circuits, outlets or breakers yourself, and never open a power supply.

04Connect and power on

Connect your monitor to a port on one of the NVIDIA graphics cards.
Connect keyboard, mouse and network, then press the power button. The first boot with a lot of memory can take a few minutes while the memory is trained. This is normal.
If some GPUs are missing later, enter the BIOS and check that Above 4G Decoding and Resizable BAR are enabled.

05First boot and software

Your system ships with the operating system and software you chose on your quote, for example Ubuntu with the NVIDIA driver, CUDA, PyTorch and vLLM, or Windows.
On first boot, create your user account, connect to the network and install updates: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade. Reboot afterwards.
Kernel updates can need a matching NVIDIA driver. If nvidia-smi stops working after an update, reinstall the recommended driver with sudo ubuntu-drivers install and reboot.
Keep work in Python virtual environments or containers so system packages and the driver stay stable.

06Verify the system

Run nvidia-smi. Every GPU you ordered should be listed with its full memory size and no errors.
Check the CPU and memory with lscpu and free -h, and storage with lsblk.
Confirm PyTorch sees the GPUs: python3 -c "import torch; print(torch.cuda.is_available(), torch.cuda.device_count())".
Run a 15–30 minute load test of your real workload while you watch temperatures with nvidia-smi -l 5. GPUs should hold steady well below their throttle point.
Write down the serial numbers of the system and its GPUs (nvidia-smi -q | grep -i serial). You need them for any warranty claim.

07Getting help

For setup, configuration, performance and troubleshooting questions, use the AI technical assistant in the chat (bottom right of any page). Paste exact error messages and command output for the best answers. It is best-effort, so verify before acting.
Hardware faults (a dead part, failing memory, a GPU missing after basic checks) are covered by the component manufacturer’s warranty. The assistant can help you identify the failing part and its serial number.
Warranty terms: see our quote and order terms at /terms/.