Boston Quattro 6000GP review

For power fault tolerance the chassis has a pair of 1,200W hot-plug supplies, and despite the massive specification we found the 6000GP did well in our power tests. Connected to our inline meter it recorded a draw of 36W in standby. We then powered each node up and took measurements with them running idle and with SiSoft Sandra pushing all cores on each one to near maximum.

In idle we saw one, two, three and four nodes draw a total of 234W, 349W, 497W and 630W. Under pressure these figures rose to 345W, 541W, 802W and 1026W respectively. Even if you could find an application that pushed the cores this hard you'll find each server node draws a maximum of 256W - not bad for a 12-core system. Dell's PowerEdge R900, reviewed in our sister title IT Pro, has four 130W X7450 six-core processors and that consumes 778W under heavy load.

When we reviewed Boston's Quattro 5500G and its 32 Xeon 5500 cores we thought it wasn't possible to beat it for processing density, but the new 6000GP does and by a big margin too. Packing this much into a 2U rack server deserves a medal but Boston will just have to make do with a PC Pro Recommended award instead.

Author: Dave Mitchell