The second machine that we look at is the Fujitsu-Siemens TX200. This is a server for cost-aware customers, based on the Intel 5000V chipset. It is sold as a (deep) tower or as a 4U rack mount, and has room for two dual- or quad-core Xeons, 24GB of FBD667 memory and six hard disks. Controllers are present for SATA, SAS and SCSI with basic RAID features and optional extensions. Those who prefer to use their own controller can resort to one of the present two PCIe slots (x8 and x4), two PCI-X slots or the single ordinary PCI slot. The standard 600 Watt power supply can be given a brother for some extra security. The machine supports Windows 2000 and 2003, Suse and Red Hat Linux, Vmware, SCO OpenServer and UnixWare.
Note that we do not pretend in any way that the TX200 is competition for the X4600: we wanted to use the opportunity to get an idea of the performance that a relatively cheap system with two quadcores can deliver. With two 1,6GHz Clovertowns and only 4GB of memory, this machine stands in sharp contrast to the high-end gear that we usually like to grill, but that is precisely the reason that some valuable lessons may be learnt from it. The configuration which we tested costs 3299 euros.
