Review: Opteron for Servers

The competition

AMD positions the Opteron, despite its 64 bit capabilities, as a competitor to Intel's Xeon - and even Intel shares this view. Therefore, we run the Newisys machine against two servers based on the P4-Xeon: IBM's entry level server xSeries 225 and Dell's midrange system PowerEdge 4600.

Our review machine of IBM's xSeries 225 features two Xeon processors at 2,40 GHz clock speed and 2 GBytes of Dual-Channel-DDR266-SDRAM. Only one Ultra320-SCSI drive spins in the system, but there is enough space for six of them. The motherboard is also equipped with a graphics chip and a Gigabit Ethernet controller, expansions can be implemented via one 32-bit PCI-slot and four PCI-64-slots. Some features typical for servers are sadly missed with the x225 - like a management chipset, restricted physical access to the drives or redundant components. The overall feature set reminds of a workstation - the motherboard even features an AGP slot, which is completely uncommon for servers.

Dell's PowerEdge 4600 is in total contrast to the IBM machine. As a robust solution for workgroups it is controlled by a management chipset by ServerWorks and also brings a load of High-Availability features. These include fully redundant power supplies. A dual-channel-RAID controller connects to up to ten Ultra320-SCSI drives, which gives an overall capacity of close to 1,5 TBytes. Seven PCI slots, six of them with PCI-X, are ready for expansion. Two Xeon processors at 2800 MHz each should give enough horse powers. With our review system, these CPUs can access 4 Gbytes of registered DDR200 memory.