HP ProLiant DL80 Gen9 review

HP’s new DL80 Gen9 brings E5-2600 v3 server power within the reach of SMBs

IT Pro Verdict

SMBs that want the latest E5-2600 v3 Xeons in their server will like the budget-friendly ProLiant DL80 Gen9. It may have a low starting price but features aren’t compromised and its high capacity makes it a fine choice for storage-centric apps

Reasons to buy
  • +

    Excellent value; Support for E5-2600 v3 Xeons; High storage capacity; Good expansion; Scalable design

Reasons to avoid
  • -

    8-bay model can’t be upgraded to 12 bays; Cold-swap cooling fans

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Network and power

Internal design is excellent with the base system including two cold-swap fans positioned in front of the occupied CPU socket. There's room for two more on each side of these which you'll need when you upgrade to dual CPUs and use the expansion slots over the PSU bay.

All models in the family have two Gigabit ports and HP offers plenty of network upgrades including 10GbE, Fibre Channel and more. Even with only a single CPU in residence, we had five PCI-Express slots available so upgrade potential is excellent.

With two CPUs installed, we could add additional riser cards to increase the slot count to 7 and there's room over the PSU bay for a GPU card. The standard 500W cold-swap PSU won't be enough for a GPU but you can upgrade to 800W redundant PSUs.

The E5-2603 v3 and its low 85W TDP makes the DL80 Gen9 a real power miser. In idle, we clocked the review system drawing a paltry 45W and peaking at only 71W when under maximum load from the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking app.

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Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.

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