Systemax Mission 8102

General remote-management tools are provided by Supermicro's SuperO Doctor III utility, which offers a slick remote web-browser management interface. There's plenty of system information to hand with a complete list of all system components, and you can monitor the health of various critical components and manage power cycling. The utility can create reports on the system and send out email warnings if errors are detected, plus different access permissions can be granted by creating a user list. The RAID card also gets in on the management act as it's supplied with Adaptec's browser-based Storage Manager utility, which provides good local and remote array administration tools.

If you want the latest Intel processors then Supermicro is probably the only place to go, as few other vendors will move in as quickly with support for the new Xeons and chipsets. The current lack of a shipping Windows Server 2003 for 64-bit processing makes this feature largely academic at the moment. But the Mission 8102 still offers plenty of other useful features, excellent build quality and management tools - and all at a competitive price.

Author: Dave Mitchell