I have used many Intel Pro/1000 PT Quad network adapters to provide extra ports in servers for a few years now. They are well supported Intel 82571GB-based cards that are re-branded by Dell and other vendors. The big advantage to cards like these are that they allow users to add a lot of network ports into a single PCIe...
In my main workstation I have used a custom water cooling loop with a triple 120mm fan radiator since the Intel Core i7-920 came out. That loop is great, but requires a lot of maintenance. Not only that, the setup requires a lot of tubing inside the chassis so I decided to look at some of today's closed loop...
For those that store information on Amazon's S3 cloud storage platform, good news, it is going to be a bit less expensive in the future to store things. Amazon has reduced pricing starting 1 February 2012 for the first 1PB of storage. Over the first PB, storage prices remain the same. Now with all of this said, it is...
Intel will be launching the Xeon E5 series in the near future. The Xeon E5-1600 series CPUs are single socket only with three parts that look like their Core i7 desktop counterparts and have either four our six cores plus Hyper Threading. The high-end will be taken by the Xeon E5-4600 series, with the '4' denoting that the CPUs...
Over the past few weeks I have had the chance to play with some 8 core 16 thread Intel Sandy Bridge-EP based Xeon samples which will ultimately be part of the Xeon E5-2600 lineup. I will say that the turbo frequencies seem to be working a little strangely on these chips, but the one I am using for the...
Today we are looking at the ASUS P9X79 motherboard for Intel's LGA 2011 Sandy Bridge-E processors. It is quite likely that this board gets paired with one of two types of chips, first the Intel Core i7-3930K or a lower-clocked Xeon E5 CPU. As we have covered previously ASUS does a great job of segmenting markets by building a...
For the Supermciro X7SPE-HF-D525 pfSense appliance I discussed in the linked post I of course wanted a chassis for my appliance and decided to purchase the CSE-502L-200B for just under $70 (see ebay and NewEgg). Oftentimes one does not need a massive chassis for a server. Frankly, with all of the mITX and mATX form factor boards out there,...
I just wanted to update everyone on the Supermicro X7SPA-HF-D525 and X7SPE-HF-D525 review that was posted earlier as I have had a bit more time running the unit, especially as a pfsense appliance. Areas that will be looked at here are a higher-than-spec memory limit (4GB is not the max!), power consumption, and a word about IPMI 2.0 connectivity....
One thing I have been looking at for a long time has been doing formal “awards” or best-buy ratings on things I review. What a lot of even regular readers do not know is that I probably only post reviews of about 1/3 of the product I look at. Frankly, if I would rate something as an overpriced 2...
The Supermicro X7SPA-HF-D525 and Supermicro X7SPE-HF-D525 boards reviewed today are somewhat unique, and let's face it; fairly expensive Intel Atom based boards. Both boards are centered around an Intel Atom D525 dual core 1.8GHz chip that can handle up to four threads through Hyper-Threading. While an Atom D525 is a fairly standard part, especially when it comes to low power...