Supermicro 7047AX-TRF/72RF SuperWorkstation Preview

Two related things were evident about the Supermicro system as soon as we got it out of the box. Firstly, it's very solidly built which, at the same time, makes it incredibly heavy. This is not a system you will want to move between offices, or even around an office, unless you absolutely have to. The side panel is secured by a locking catch, but also two screws at the rear that are not thumbscrews.

If you do have a reason to access the internals on a regular basis, we suspect these screws will be left off as the catch secures the panel firmly. This would be particularly likely if the chassis is installed on its side in a 4U rack mount.

.The chassis includes a bank of four internal fans to draw air in from the front of the system, with a couple more at the rear to draw air out.

This forms a flow across the two processor sockets, so the passive coolers can do their job of keeping the CPUs at a good operational temperature. This also draws air over the drive cages at the front.

These consist of three 5.25″ bays plus eight 3.5″ hot-swap bays. Only one of the latter was inhabited in our review unit, with a 2TB Western Digital 7,200rpm SATA hard disk. This will provide plenty of capacity to get you up and running, but we generally expect workstations to use solid state drives for operating system and applications, with faster loading speeds, alongside a series of large conventional hard drives for media data storage.

Supplying a single drive in a home PC for less than £1,000 makes sense, but we're not sure about the logic here. We'll assume that this is a ‘baseline' that can be used as a template – to be populated by a customer to their individual requirements.

.The chassis allows for dual-redundant power supplies, with two 1280W units installed. The front offers a pair of USB ports and a plethora of status lights, alongside the power and reset buttons.

Essentially, this is a rather serious and businesslike box. There are no front audio connections and no memory card reader is included.

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