Boston GP 1120-T review

Supermicro is always first out of the blocks with support for AMD’s latest processors and it does it once again. In this exclusive review we look at its latest “Magny-Cours” Opteron 6000 Series processors in a full production server.

This Boston 1U rack server sports a pair of 12-core 2.2GHz Opteron 6174 modules partnered by 24GB of DDR3 memory. Your processor options have been simplified by AMD as all the 6000 Series have the same 12MB of L3 cache, the same HyperTransport speed and all support 1,333MHz DDR3 memory.

Choice with AMD just comes down to whether you want eight or 12 cores, one, two or four processor sockets and what clock speed. With Intel’s Xeon 5500 and 5600 Series you have a bewildering range of QPI, clock and memory speeds, four or six cores, Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost support and varying power consumptions.

The GP 1120-T is a smart combo of Supermicro’s 1U rack chassis and H8DGU-F motherboard, and at only 26in deep, the chassis will fit a wide range of cabinets. There’s room for a quartet of standard 3.5in hot-swap bays, and the price includes a full complement of 500GB WD Enterprise SATA drives.

There’s space at the front for a DVD drive along with power and recessed reset buttons. A small panel sits to the right with a collection of status LEDs for disk and network activity, plus fault notification and a handy UID button that activates blue LEDs for easy server identification.

Storage redundancy is limited as the motherboard uses an Adaptec HostRAID embedded controller that only supports stripes and mirrors. The four drives were preconfigured in a RAID10 striped mirror, but the controller doesn’t offer an option to upgrade to RAID5.

When it comes to lid removal we’re rapidly going off the push-buttons used on some Supermicro rack servers as they can be difficult to shift. However, once inside, the interior is tidy with all cabling kept to a minimum.

The rectangular Opteron 6174 modules may be bigger than your average Xeon but they don’t require extra space. Each socket is partnered by eight DIMM slots and if you have bottomless pockets you can go up to a maximum of 256GB using 16GB DIMM modules.