HP ProLiant DL360 G5

The DL360 is looking good in the processor department as the price includes a pair of 3GHz 5450 quad-core Xeons. These are Intel's latest 'Harpertown' models which are based on 45nm manufacturing processes and come with 12MB of L2 cache.

The price also includes 4GB of 667MHz FB-DIMM memory and the eight DIMM slots allow this to go up to 32GB. Cooling is very well handled with a bank of nine, dual-rotor fans that stretches across the entire chassis with each group of three fans hot pluggable.

We were expecting this to generate a lot of noise but after power up they settled down to a steady whisper.

You can add up to two expansion cards as the chassis butterfly riser has a PCI-e slot on each side and can accept a full-height and low-profile card. Even though the 5450 Xeons have a TDP of 120W this server isn't a power hog.

Using our in-line power meter we saw it drawing 30W when powered off and in standby mode. With Windows Server 2003 R2 pottering along in idle we saw an average draw of 213W and with SiSoft Sandra pummelling all eight cores this rose to only 310W.

Along with its superb management facilities, the ProLiant DL360 G5 is offering some impressive expansion capabilities that the competition will be hard pushed to beat.

Storage capacity and data protection potential are excellent as well - low profile rack server design simply doesn't get any better than this.

Author: Dave Mitchell