Recently we had a chance to review Dell's Precision T3600, and we found it impressive. A company that seemed content to be an also-ran in the enterprise desktop space reinvigorated itself with smart new chassis designs to go along with the refreshed hardware from Intel and NVIDIA, and the resulting system proved as easy to service as it was powerful. Dell and HP can both talk up how fast their computers are, but fundamentally they're still working from the same building blocks that Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD provide them.

HP, as the incumbent enterprise vendor, sent us their Z420. From the chassis design perspective it's certainly nowhere near as radical a departure as Dell's revised Precision lineup is, but now we get a chance to set these standards against each other. On top of that, we also get our first look at Intel's octal-core Xeon processors in a desktop workstation environment. Let's see how the new HP offering compares with previously tested workstations.

Eight improved cores, 16 threads, integrated 40 lane PCIe 3.0: the new socket 2011 Xeon E5-2660 manages to package it all in a very modest power envelope of 95W TDP (at 2.2 GHz). If you read the Intel Xeon E5 paper specs, it becomes more and more likely that Intel has pulled off another "Nehalem": much better performance, richer features while consuming less power. Yes, as much as we like a good fight, the question is not whether Intel will outperform the competition and the previous Intel generation but by how much...

Intel sent us both the Xeon E5-2690 - their newest performance champ - and the more performance/watt oriented E5-2660. We managed to turn this last one into a chip that will perform like the Xeon E5-2630, a chip that is in the price range of the best Opteron 6200s. We compare Intel latest Xeon with the Xeon X5650, the Opteron 6276 and 6174. So whether you are searching for the performance champ, the best balance between performance and energy consumption or the best deal for your money, you should find an answer in this article. We improved our regular server performance testing with some HPC (LS-Dyna) and the renewed OLAP tests. Read on...

Facebook had 22 Million active users in the middle of 2007; fast forward to 2011 and the site now has 800 Million active users, with 400 million of them logging in every day. Facebook has grown exponentially, to say the least! To cope with this kind of exceptional growth and at the same time offer a reliable and cost effective service requires out of the box thinking. Through a combination of software optimizations and a careful selection of hardware, Facebook set out to create a platform that would meet their needs, and then they open sourced the design to the world.

The Facebook Open Compute server design was ambitious: “The result is a data center full of vanity free servers that is 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive to build and run than other state-of-the-art data centers.” Even better is that Facebook Engineering sent a couple Open Compute servers to our lab for testing:

As a competing solution we have an HP DL380 G7 in the lab. Recall from our last server clash that the HP DL380 G7 was one of the most power efficient servers of 2010. Is a server "targeted at the cloud" and designed by Facebook engineering able to beat one of the best and most popular general purpose servers? That is the question we'll answer in this article.

When it comes to buying a pre-built desktop for the average consumer or gamer, about the only thing the big box manufacturers really have going for them is price. That hasn't stopped them from doing very well, but oftentimes the end user will be better off going to a boutique like iBuyPower for their desktop and enjoying the generally superior build and component quality along with better customer service.

But for small business and enterprise, it can be a whole different ball game, where powerhouses like Dell and HP produce uniquely designed configurations meant for mass deployment...and have the resources to greatly improve support, to boot. We've seen business class machines from both vendors before, but today we have on hand iBuyPower's Professional Series desktop. Can a smaller boutique outfox the big boys?

Each time we publish a new server platform review, several of our readers inquire about HPC and rendering benchmarks. We're always willing to accommodate reasonable requests, so we're going to start expanding beyond our usual labor intensive virtualization benchmarks. This article is our first attempt. It was a bumpy ride, but this first attempt produced some very interesting insights.

The increasing core counts on modern servers makes finding useful benchmarks difficult, and given how many businesses have chosen to use virtualization that has been our major focus. For this article, we decided to run the latest version of Cinebench and Stars Euler 3D CFD, as both seemed like they would be fairly easy to work with. That didn't end up being the case, but at least our testing results are a lot more interesting than we imagined they would be.

We're taking our second excursion into enterprise-class desktop territory with the kind of machine that should be of interest both to IT management and enthusiasts alike: HP's Z210 SFF (small form factor) workstation. Desktop computers are capable of getting smaller and smaller these days, and with the Z210 SFF, HP is hoping to make serious number crunching power available in even the tightest of spaces. It's always interesting to see just how much performance can be crammed into a tiny computer, but did HP have to make any sacrifices to hit this target?

A month ago, Intel introduced its newest quad Xeon E7 series, the successor of the Xeon 7500. We gave you an overview of the Xeon's E7 lineup, but we didn't have benchmark results yet. According to Intel, the new Xeon established 16 new world records, beating similarily configured IBM POWER servers in some workloads and SPARC servers that are twice as expensive by a wide margin in almost any workload.

Today, we'll look at the available SAP S&D measurements, along with our results from weeks of virtualization benchmarking on ESX 4.1 update 1. By looking at both response time as throughput in our own virtualization benchmarking and power measurements with vApusMark, we get a very realistic idea what the the Xeon E7 is exactly capable off. We'll compare the best Xeon with AMD's Opteron 6174 (Dell R815) and its predecessor, the Xeon 7560.

We've spent a lot of time dissecting boutique gaming desktops, but there's another class of hardware that we only rarely get to discuss. Today that changes with the first in what we hope will be many reviews of workstation-class desktop machines, and we're kicking things off with a mid-range workstation courtesy of Dell: the new Precision T1600. Designed for low power and high performance and equipped with an entry-level workstation graphics card from NVIDIA, we'll run it through our usual desktop gauntlet along with a couple of extra tests and see what Dell brings to the table.

Yesterday, Intel announced that their flagship server processor, the Xeon Nehalem-EX, is being succeeded by the Xeon Westmere-EX, a process-shrinking " tick" in Intel's terminology. By shrinking Intel's largest Xeon to 32nm, the best Westmere-EX Xeon is now clocked 6% higher (2.4GHz versus 2.26GHz), gets two extra cores (10 versus 8) and has a 30MB L3 (instead of 24MB).

As is typical for a tick, the core improvements are rather subtle. The only tangible improvement should be the improved memory controller that is capable of extracting up to 20% more bandwidth out of the same DIMMs. The Nehalem-EX was the first quad-socket Xeon that was not starved by memory bandwidth, and we expect that the Westmere-EX will perform very well in bandwidth limited HPC applications.

Read on to learn more about the latest Xeon and the new server we are testing.

Our last comprehensive server and server CPU review focused on some of the best and fastest x86 servers on the market. This time, we focus on more humble servers. Performance is not necessarily priority one for many businesses; chances are that low power and budget are higher on the list. So we did our best to get the most interesting power sipping and inexpensive CPUs in the lab.

We selected three AMD Opterons and two Intel Xeons. On the Intel platform we test with the older but very cheap Xeon E5506 and the newer but more expensive low power Xeon L5630. AMD sent us three different Opterons: the low power Opteron 4162 EE, the performance/watt balancing Opteron 4170 HE, and the ultra cheap Opteron 4122. Read on to find out which of the five CPUs make sense in which situation. As always we use very realistisic benchmarking and power measurments to find out.

Three totally different servers in one test: the dual Xeon X5670 HP DL380 G7, the quad Xeon X7560 SGI Altix UV10 and the Quad Opteron 6174 Dell R815. Three servers with a different platform and built from a different vision. Why place them in one comparitive article? Because they can all be used for the same tasks: virtualization building blocks, ERP server, or HPC number cruncher. Our focus is on the first task, as we went through a massive battery of performance and power consumption measurements.

Join us as we present you the first virtualized performance per watt comparison of real OEM server products.