AMD Opteron Coverage - Part 3: The First Servers Arrive

The CPUs and half of the memory banks are covered by a piece of thick paper in the shape of a tunnel that is designed to channel air from the blower compartment adjacent to the motherboard over the CPUs and out the rear of the chassis. We have seen better solutions in the past, such as the plastic ducting from CCSI, as the paper approach isn't exactly top notch. We have to give it to Appro here though, it does get the job done, although it is difficult to gain access to the CPUs without tearing the paper (it doesn't help that the paper is perforated at the corners).

Beneath the paper tunnel you'll find two heatsinks covering the two Opteron CPUs that ship with the server by default. Our sample featured Opteron 240 processors (1.40GHz), but you can configure the machine however you would like.

Appro also configured our server with 8 - 512MB DDR333 memory modules by ATP; we haven't had much experience with their DIMMs although they did not give us any troubles during our tests. We have been using Corsair's modules without any issues in all of our Opteron tests thus far. Remember that Opterons require registered ECC DIMMs and will not work with regular unbuffered DDR SDRAM; you also must be certain to install DIMMs in pairs in order to match the 144-bit wide Opteron memory bus. Since AMD did not use independent memory controllers, it is impossible to install just a single DIMM and have it work.

If you lift open the next panel on the 1100H you'll expose the four blowers that cool the system. The blowers pull in cool air from the front of the case, thus thoroughly cooling the hard drive(s), and blow it through the powersupply and motherboard compartment in order to keep everything running nicely. As you can expect, this configuration isn't optimized for low noise emissions, but then again if you've ever been to a datacenter you'll know that the whirring of thousands of fans isn't uncommon. The blowers are easily accessible and easily replaceable, with a warning light at the front of the chassis indicating a failure.