Detailing the Chipsets
The soul of the V40z runs on four Opteron 850 (2.4GHz, 1MB L2, 130nm) processors. The daughterboard obstructs the majority of the airflow to the rear of the system, so plastic rails partition air to each bank of memory and each processor. The cooler air from the hard drive bays is pulled over the daughterboard to cool the rear processors. You'll notice that there is no active cooling on this portion of the chassis; fans directly opposite the daughterboard (slightly above the mainboard) pull cool air from the outside of the case directly over these heat sinks.
Click to enlarge.
The daughterboard connects to the mainboard via a proprietary Sun interface, but with the rails and guides holding the daughterboard, we had no problems determining if we had a clean connection between boards.
Click to enlarge.
As with any Opteron system, each processor has a dedicated bank of memory; in our case, two Samsung 1GB PC2700 modules per processor. The older 130nm "CG" stepping on Opteron 8xx only allows for PC2700 memory in Sun's V40z, but the newer
"E4" stepping now supports PC3200 as well. We will get more into Sun's 90nm "E4" stepping solution in just a bit. Each processor bank can utilize 8GB of memory (four DIMMs) in 64-bit operation, giving the V40z a total capacity of 32GB.
Click to enlarge.
Behind the bank of DDR DIMMs in the image above, we can also see the 12V individual voltage regulator module (VRM). With larger processor configurations, regulating clean power to each processor becomes essential, and thus, each processor has a dedicated VRM. Below, you can see one of the Opteron 850s is exposed from under the copper heat sink on the daughterboard.
Click to enlarge.
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RyanVM - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Did anybody else find it confusing that the reviewed system had CG-stepping Opteron 850s and Kris brought up E4-stepping Opteron 852s on multiple occasions? What CPUs were actually in the system?SUOrangeman - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Last page, .."Sun has a speed **daemon** on their hands, ..."
Freudian slip, hehe? Nice read nonetheless.
-SUO
KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
MrEMan: Mediaplex is just an advertising server. Some advertisers (like NewEgg) host their banners on Mediaplex so they don't destroy their bandwidth. Sometimes when an ad campaign is hitting too many impressions the Mediaplex tag will revert to a 2x2 or a 1x1 pixel so that they don't harm their click through rates. It has nothing to do with spyware or malware or adware.Kristopher
MrEMan - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Anandtech,What is with the 1/16" x 1/16" graphic (1280x1024 resolution on a 19" CRT monitor) for adfarm.mediaplex.com ?
Is it there with your permission or did someone hack your site?
If it is there with your permission, I must say I am surprised that you would put such stealth adware garbage links on your site.
jcourtney - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
I'd love to see some benchmarks with Solaris instead of or vs. Linux for reference too. Nice read though as usual.ElFenix - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
"particularly considering the fact that the V40z does not utilize any active cooling directly on their CPU heat sinks"whoa, proper spelling of heat sink!
now i'm going to harp on the fact that blowing air across a radiator with a fan is not active cooling. air conditioning is active cooling, turning on the ceiling fan is not.
=)
nice read
Hikari - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
I wish I could see a comparison of this and that Quad Opteron HP server. I have the HP one budgeted for this year already... (we're also a Sun shop).I didn't see an option for 15k RPM drives though. I could put in like 5-146GB@15k RPM in the HP which was one reason I was leaning towards it.
lihoyin - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Looking forward for a comparsion with HP DL585 / DL 385, both are also Monsters!Sunner - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Googer, that's true, Sun basically just rebadges Newisys servers, the same is true of the V20Z, in fact IIRC you can actually find some Newisys marks left on the servers :)Anyway, Kris, any chance of a couple of benchmarks with a 2.6 based distro?
2.6 has, among other things, good NUMA support, something that would be nice to have when running a 4-way Opteron ;)
//Sunner
dougSF30 - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Another 250/850 typo on page 3: "Below, you can see one of the Opteron 250s is exposed from under the copper heat sink on the daughterboard."