Armari Magnetar X-Series Paxville Demonstrator
Armari don't actually list the particular system they built for our Paxville evaluation, however it's not far off their Magnetar XR-SLI, the biggest differences being the mainboard and CPUs, and the Paxville demo box's single graphics board. It's the usual Supermicro SuperServer 743T-645W chassis that we've seen before, usually housing something with Opterons in the CPU sockets. Here's the spec.| Armari Magnetar X-Series Paxville Demonstrator | |
|---|---|
| Processor(s) | 2 x Intel Xeon DP 'Paxville', 2800MHz, dual-core 200MHz bus, 2MiB L2 per core, Socket 604 |
| Memories | 2 x 2GiB DDR2-400, Registered, ECC |
| Mainboard | Supermicro X6DA3-G2 |
| Graphics | PNY Quadro FX 3450, 256MiB, PCI Express NVIDIA NV41GL, 425/500 |
| Audio | Supermicro X6DA3-G2 on-board AC'97 |
| Fixed Disks | 2 x Seagate 250GB SATA w/NCQ Adaptec AIC-9410W RAID0 |
| Optical Disks | Sony DRU-810A dual-layer DVD writer IDE, ICH5R |
| Chassis | Supermicro SuperServer 743T-645W 645W PSU, 8 SATA hot-swap bays |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional 64-bit Service Pack 2 |
Impressions
The Armari speciality is that of building extremely high-end, extremely well integrated workstation and server systems. They did just that for the Paxville system you see specced above. While the Supermicro chassis makes a lot of the integration work easy, Armari's team still go to lengths to make sure its clean and tidy inside, easy to work with, and most importantly in a completely functional and stable state for the consumer. As pseudo consumers of their hardware, they extend HEXUS the same courtesies they afford their paying customers, so we get to see what you'll get, should you splash the cash.While we're not reviewing their system as such, it's worth pointing out that they did exactly as we asked with the Paxville evaluation system, right down to hardware choices, OS choice and configuration, and the small details to make my life easier in producing this article for HEXUS.core. They even furnished us with the same spec sheet and cost breakdown that they'd assemble for a paying customer, without any shortcuts or hidden items (that we can see, anyway!). In short, Armari are one of the best system integrators in the UK, with good partners downstream and probably (we should put it to the test!) the best integration quality for a no-nonsense workstation available in this country.
Pictures
