Boston Value Series 350T review

The majority of entry-level servers are equipped with Intel’s low-cost Xeon E3 CPU, but Boston’s Value Series 350T gives you much more power for your money. This compact system packs a dual-socket motherboard, and it’s the first we’ve seen with Intel’s new Xeon E5-2400 v2 processors.

Boston Value Series 350T review: key features

The majority of entry-level servers are equipped with Intel’s low-cost Xeon E3 CPU, but Boston’s Value Series 350T gives you much more power for your money. This compact system packs a dual-socket motherboard, and it’s the first we’ve seen with Intel’s new Xeon E5-2400 v2 processors.

In another first for Boston, the 350T’s Supermicro motherboard is housed in an Ablecom CS-W43 chassis. Traditionally, Boston has offered all-Supermicro systems, and although the Ablecom chassis keeps costs down, its build quality leaves much to be desired.

The drive door can be locked shut, but we found we could remove the entire plastic bezel, complete with door, simply by unclipping it. The filler panels also have an annoying habit of disappearing inside 5.25in device bays if accidentally poked.

It’s spacious enough, though, with a four-bay hot-swap drive cage behind the door and room above for a couple of 5.25in devices. The 350T scores well for storage, too: the drive cage has a 6Gbits/sec SAS/SATA backplane and the price includes a pair of 1TB WD SATA hard disks.

The motherboard offers a veritable feast of ports: along the bottom of the board, there’s one group of eight SAS/SATA ports, which support mirrored and striped RAID arrays; next up are six SATA ports – two that support 6Gbits/sec speed and four that run at 3Gbits/sec – which are capable of handling stripes and mirrors, plus RAID10 and RAID5 arrays. It’s a pity that Boston has chosen to cable the drive backplane to four of the SAS ports, since this puts RAID5 out of the picture. Power is delivered by an 80 Plus Bronze fixed PSU, which has plenty of extra power connectors for additional devices.

Boston Value Series 350T review: hardware and power consumption

Powering it all is a pair of six-core E5-2420 v2 Xeons, so the 350T can’t be faulted for processing power. Launched at the start of 2014, the E5-2400 v2 family aims to deliver improved performance without a significant increase in power demands. It has the same number of cores as the v1, but gets a boost from 1.9GHz to 2.2GHz, while a process shrink to 22nm takes its TDP from 95W to 80W. It also supports Turbo Boost 2 and can be pushed to 2.7GHz if there’s enough thermal headroom. Here there should be plenty: both CPUs have active heatsinks, with a rear-mounted chassis fan catching all the hot air and venting it quietly out the back.

The price also includes a generous 12GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 RDIMM memory spread across the six DIMM slots. A maximum of 192GB of RDIMM memory is supported; those with the cash can push this to 364GB using expensive LR-DIMMs.

The v2 Xeons deliver on Intel’s power-efficiency promises. In our tests, the 350T consumed 94W idle and peaked at 145W under heavy load from the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking app. The PC Pro Recommended Dell PowerEdge T420, with a pair of 2.2GHz E5-2430 Xeons onboard, pulled a much higher 230W under load.

The 350T has a pair of Gigabit ports, one of which is used to access the embedded IPMI 2 controller and the server’s web browser interface. The latter is a little basic, but it provides sensor data for critical components and lets you tie in thresholds with SNMP traps and email alerting. However, the interface’s power-monitoring graphs didn’t get any readings from the PSU.

You can power the server up and down or reset it remotely, and remote control and virtual media services come as standard; HP and Dell charge for these features. The price includes Supermicro’s SuperDoctor 5 management tool, too, with further tools supplied by Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology (RST) console. The former uses the local Windows SNMP agent to monitor the server remotely, issue email alerts, and provide graphs and dials for temperatures, fans and voltages. The RST console keeps an eye on the chipset and gives you tools to expand and create arrays. It can also issue email alerts for storage-related warnings or errors.

Boston Value Series 350T review: verdict

The 350T’s closest competitor is Dell’s PowerEdge T420, which is larger and pricier, costing nigh on £2,000 for a similarly specified system, even heavily discounted. The Value Series 350T is much better value for money, but the cut-price Ablecom chassis is a big drawback.