Boston 3000GP in Servers

In our power tests our inline meter reported the server drawing 44W in standby mode. With one server powered up and running in idle this rose to 188W and with both servers fired up consumption increased to 335W. Using SiSoft Sandra to pummel the processors we recorded a draw of 290W for one server and 533W with all sixteen cores under maximum load.

We compared these results with a Dell PowerEdge T605 we reviewed with dual 2.3GHz Barcelona Opterons which was measured drawing 21W in standby, 247W in idle and 326W under maximum load. Shanghai is more power efficient than Barcelona and doubling these figures shows it clearly delivers on AMD's promises.

Not only is the 3000GP the first production server to market with the new Shanghai Opteron processors but it delivers a remarkable specification in the process. Packing twin motherboards and sixteen processor cores into a 1U rack server is no mean achievement and yet it's easy on the utility supply, comes with a complete remote server management package and is good value as well.

Author: Dave Mitchell