Dell PowerEdge R430 review

Deployment and power

Dell's embedded LifeCycle Controller makes light work of OS deployment as we used it to install Windows Server 2012 R2 with all the right drivers inside 30 minutes. It provides firmware upgrades tools, hardware diagnostics and facilities for configuring remote access and storage.

Dell's iDRAC8 provides a wealth of remote management features. Along with power controls, we could monitor graphs of power consumption and temperatures but if you want full remote control, you'll must upgrade to the Enterprise version - we've included this in the price shown.

The server was supplied with dual 1.6GHz E5-2603 Xeons and redundant 550W Platinum PSUs which proved to be easy on the power supply. With the OS in idle we measured a draw of 85W which peaked at only 132W with the CPUs under extreme load from the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking app.

Dell's OMM iOS app allowed us to keep a close eye on the server from our iPad