HP ProLiant DL80 Gen9 review

Network and power

Internal design is excellent with the base system including two cold-swap fans positioned in front of the occupied CPU socket. There's room for two more on each side of these which you'll need when you upgrade to dual CPUs and use the expansion slots over the PSU bay.

All models in the family have two Gigabit ports and HP offers plenty of network upgrades including 10GbE, Fibre Channel and more. Even with only a single CPU in residence, we had five PCI-Express slots available so upgrade potential is excellent.

With two CPUs installed, we could add additional riser cards to increase the slot count to 7 and there's room over the PSU bay for a GPU card. The standard 500W cold-swap PSU won't be enough for a GPU but you can upgrade to 800W redundant PSUs.

The E5-2603 v3 and its low 85W TDP makes the DL80 Gen9 a real power miser. In idle, we clocked the review system drawing a paltry 45W and peaking at only 71W when under maximum load from the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking app.

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