This article is part of group review of six 2U servers 

It’s difficult to believe how Fujitsu Siemens’ Primergy RX300S3 can offer such a remarkable specification for the price limit we set: £3,999 buys a pair of quad-core Xeons, a generous helping of memory and a full complement of Raid-protected SAS hard disks.

Build quality is also high, with an extremely solid chassis and a few nifty internal design touches. For example, the entire motherboard is shrouded in removable transparent plastic covers that direct air flow where it is needed most. The eight hot-swap fans are remarkably quiet although an overly enthusiastic power supply fan rather spoils the show.

The processors are the slower 1.6GHz variety with a 1066MHz FSB, but it is still no mean feat to deliver eight-way processing at this price. The six hot-swap 3.5in bays have been fully populated with 146GB SAS hard disks and the backplane is directly connected to the motherboard. This has an embedded LSI SAS controller upgraded with a Raid iButton enabler, 256MB cache and battery backup pack.

An embedded IPMI controller allows the server to be remotely accessed irrespective of its condition and the complete ServerView software suite is included. This provides an SNMP-based interface that lets administrators access all systems with the relevant agent installed and take advantage of a good range of hardware monitoring and early warning capabilities.

The supplied riser card had three full-length PCI-X slots but the backplane assembly can be replaced with one that accepts vertically mounted cards. Only half-height cards can be used but this does allow all five slots on the motherboard to be used.

Next review: HP ProLiant DL380 G5