Dell PowerEdge R510 review

Internally, everything looks neat and tidy with easy access to all major components. The two processor sockets are staggered down the motherboard for improved cooling and each are partnered by six DIMM sockets. These are covered by a large plastic air shroud, and cooling is handled by a row of five cold-swap fans, which we found generated very low noise levels.

You have two choices for power with the review system fitted with a single 1,100W hot-plug supply and this can be augmented with a second for redundancy. With the four drive model you can cut costs and go for a single 480W cold-swap supply.

You can automate Altiris agent installation for selected systems from the Dell Management Console.

The R510 on review was equipped with a pair of 2.26GHz L5520 Xeons offering a low TDP of 60W. These delivered good results in our power consumption tests. With the server in standby our in-line meter recorded 11W and with Server 2008 running in idle this rose to 115W.

With SiSoft Sandra thrashing all 16 logical cores to the max we saw this peak at only 225W. To put this in perspective in our review of a similarly specified Dell PowerEdge R710 we clocked power consumption peaking under full CPU load at 270W.

The R510 packs in a lot of features and looks a good choice for businesses requiring a high local storage capacity in their rack. Strong competition comes from HP’s ProLiant DL360 G6 but the R510 is more compact and the forthcoming model with extra drive bays will be able to match it closely for capacity.