Boston Quattro 5500GP review

The 5500GP scores highly in the power stakes and we measured consumption with both 720W supplies linked up to our in-line meter. In standby, the system drew only 26W even though it was providing a trickle feed to the four IPMI chips. We then powered each node up and took measurements with them running in idle and with SiSoft Sandra pushing the cores on each one to near maximum utilisation.

In idle we saw one, two, three and four nodes draw a total of 218W, 376W, 475W and 584W and under pressure these figures rose to 686W, 780W, 879W and 976W respectively. The final figure may seem high but bear in mind you have four, eight-core servers all under heavy processing loads consuming less than 250W each.

The Quattro 5500GP is quite unique as nothing else on the server market can deliver this level of processing density in a 2U rack chassis. All four server nodes are decked out with plenty of DDR3 memory plus the latest low power 5500 Xeons and breaking the price down shows that you're paying less than £2,900 per node which would be good value for even just one rack server with this specification.

Author: Dave Mitchell