Supermicro RTG RX-2280i review
This Ready To Go (RTG) system starts at just under £2,000, so if you need an affordable Xeon E5-2600 rack server with next day delivery, the RX-2280i is for you.
Processor and memory support
The motherboard can handle any of the E5-2600 Xeon family but to keep costs down the server is supplied with a single 2.4GHz E5-2609 CPU. This is a member of Intel's Basic Xeon E5 family and has quad cores, a 10MB L3 cache and a maximum QPI speed of 6.4GT/sec.
Memory speed tops out at 1066MHz, it doesn't support Intel's Turbo Boost and Hyper-Threading isn't on the menu either. However, the E5-2607 does have a low 80W TDP which showed up nicely in our power tests.
With both 740W redundant power supplies connected to our in-line meter, we recorded the server drawing only 85W with Windows Server 2008 R2 in idle. With the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking app pummelling all four physical cores, we saw this peak at only 110W.
The motherboard has 16 DIMM slots but in the review system only 8 are active as you'll need to add a second processor to enable them all a feature common to all Xeon E5-2600 servers. Value looks good as the server comes with 8GB of DDR3 RDIMM memory and in dual CPU systems a maximum of 512GB is supported.
The new remote web console provides more detail on sensor readings and you can add graph widgets showing real-time values
Expansion and remote management
Expansion potential is good as even with the RAID card in residence, there's room for three more PCI-e cards. It's also useful know that the top two slots have enough room behind them for full-height, full-length cards.
The motherboard has Supermicro's RMM chip on board for remote management via a dedicated network port at the rear. The web interface sees some graphical refreshment as it's been redesigned to be more informative.
The home page now provides an at-a-glance table of sensor readings for critical components along with a thumbnail view of the server's screen and a pie chart of the event log. Power can be remotely controlled but you still don't get any consumption graphs as you do with HP's iLO4 controller.
Unlike Dell or HP, you get remote control and virtual media services included as standard
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