Fujitsu Primergy RX600 S5 review

Fujitsu employs a tool-free internal design so you can leave your screwdrivers at home for maintenance and upgrades. All cooling is handled by a bank of eight hot-swap fans at the front and during testing we found the server to be as quiet as the R910 and x3850 X5.

Behind the fans you have a row of eight cold-swap memory boards each with eight DIMM slots. When 16GB modules become available and you can afford them you can take memory up to the maximum of 1TB. Memory protection is on a par with Dell and IBM as the RX600 S5 supports mirroring, hot-sparing and scrubbing plus the new chipset MCA Recovery feature allows the server to handle two-bit memory errors.

Power redundancy looks good as the server supports up to four 850W hot-swap supplies with the price of the review system including three of them. These are all easily accessible at the rear of the chassis.

To test power consumption we linked our in-line power meter to all three supplies where it reported a draw of 498W with Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise in idle. With SiSoft Sandra hammering all 64 logical cores we recorded a peak consumption of 895W.

This compares well with the IBM x3850 X5 we had in the lab last month as it also had four 2GHz Xeon X7550 processors plus 64GB of memory and returned figures of 485W and 835W for each test. Dell's R910 has twice the amount of memory and we recorded idle and peak readings of 539W and 859W.

To one side of the PCI-e expansion slots is a proprietary card sporting quad Gigabit, monitor and serial ports. This also has Fujitsu's iRMC S2 controller which provides a dedicated management port and full remote access to the server.