It has been a while since a unit has come in to us directly from distribution for review.  Current trends normally we see the baseline mainboards and all those other wonderful high-end peripherals that help you make that all important final buy decision.  Therefore with the advent of AMD's new 6 Core Opteron was presented to us in a completed bundle by Boston it did save us a huge amount of time with build and initial burn in tests.

When we spend monies of this magnitude we need a system to arrive into place and be up and running first go ready to work and recoup from the outlay.  The supplied system from Boston was impeccably put together with all the cabling neatly routed to the onboard peripherals and those not needed, tidily tucked away.  The sleek Supermicro black chassis supporting the  Supermicro H8DAI mainboard based upon NVIDIA's MCP 55 Chipset certainly has the bundled storage abilities and upgrade paths which will keep most end users happy for a long time to come.

The Boston Venom GPU system front panel is crammed full of ready access storage, with 8 hot-swap bays.   The system we looked at came pre-configured with a  500GB Western Digital RE3 as the boot drive and maintaining Supermicro's green IT policy backup was copiously occupied by 2 X 2TB Western Digital's new RE4 GreenPower SATA hard disks configured into Raid 1 for reliability and security.

The new Opterons unveil AMD's HT Assist technology, which keeps a record of cached data and use this to direct a processor to the relevant cache in another processor if it isn't stored locally. The HyperTransport 3 gets a bandwidth hike up  to 4.8GT/sec and power management is improved dramatically.