Taking a Look Inside
As with most hardware at AnandTech, we needed to take a look inside to fully determine the capabilities of our V40z. Upon entry of the system, we are greeted with a diagram of the V40z quick reference on the back of the removable panel.
Click to enlarge.
With the exception of the removable top panel, the entire Sun Fire V40z can be disassembled completely without any tools. Locking mechanisms in strategic places assure that power supplies, bezels and hard drives stay in place when they should, but at the same time, to remove a critical component – even during operation – seems relatively easy. Without the main bank of internal fans, we can see the rear processors under their giant 4” copper heat sinks.
Click to enlarge.
We actually stumbled across a block diagram of the motherboard and daughterboard outlining most of the components that make up the Sun Fire V40z. We intend to go in detail about each of the components and their purpose.
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
Because of the 3U design of the Sun Fire, a motherboard and daughterboard design was needed to allow maintenance of the second set of Opteron processors. The processors on the daughterboard are referred to as the “forward” CPUs because they pull out of the front of our V40z. The “rear” processors are technically the CPU0 and CPU1 to our operating system and are located on the mainboard.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
38 Comments
View All Comments
dougSF30 - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Typo page 1: "In January, Sun sent us a V40z demonstration unit that was complete with four Opteron 250s and 8GB of PC2700."It should be "four Opteron 850's"
Also, page 3: "The older 130nm "CG" stepping on Opteron 8xx only allows for PC2700 memory"
This is not true, generally. I don't know about the v40z, but CG Opterons can use PC3200 no problem.
See here, for example: http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2004q3/...
Ardan - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
I agree with #16. Fantastic work, Kristopher! I have a family member that works for a division of Lockheed-Martin and they are dealing with Sun more and more now and he enjoys your articles when I show them to him. He said a few weeks ago that he shows some of these articles to co-workers because of the thorough evaluations and it is helping them to decide whether or not to outfit their systems with Serial ATA drives (for Destroyers) and now with Opteron systems from Sun.Good work! ;)
tfranzese - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Excellent work Kris.KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Something is wrong with the DB graphs: i am fixing it now.Kristopher
Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
http://www.newisys.com/products/4300.htmlGooger - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
This server is aperantly made by Nhttp://www.newisys.com/products/4300.htmlGooger - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
OOPS, this is suppost to go where the blank post is.To the author or whom it may concern: A bad link is located on page 3 and reads:
two Samsung 1GB PC2700 – link to Samsung.jpg>
Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Googer - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
I want Game Benchmarks too! (just for fun though)nourdmrolNMT1 - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
database benchmarks arent workin here either.MIKE