Boston GP 1120-T review

To put this in perspective, we ran power tests on another 1U rack server sporting a pair of six-core X5650 Xeons and 12GB of DDR3 memory. This system also had two 650W power supplies and with Windows Server 2008 R2 in idle we recorded a draw of 200W. With SiSoft Sandra pushing all 24 logical Xeon cores this rose to a significantly higher peak of 380W.

Remote management is present and correct as the ‘F’ variant of this motherboard has an embedded RMM and dedicated network port. This allows the server to be remotely accessed via a tidy web browser interface offering plenty of operational information.

You can keep an eye on a range of sensors for critical components and have full control over the power supply. For access security you can use LDAP or RADIUS servers for external authentication to the remote controller and decide what each user is allowed to do. KVM-over-IP is a valuable feature as this allows you to access the BIOS setup menu and OS remotely and designate devices on remote hosts as virtual media.

The GP 1120-T shows clearly Supermicro’s commitment to AMD and from our experience it’ll be a while before we see any other vendors releasing similar products to market. Boston also sets a high standard as it packs an impressive processing density into a compact 1U rack server and combines this with good expansion potential and remote management features.