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great eight-way performane and service/-- ability makes it worth the price tag.
The Compaq ProLiant 8500 is a rather pricey enterprise server costing $85,000, but you get what you pay for in that it's a beautifully designed fight-way box that yields the highest performance of any server we have tested. On top of its great performance, this server is a breeze to take apart and reassemble, which gives it an added boost in the serviceability arena.
The ProLiant 8500 comes in a seven rack-space package - an average size for a server this powerful - with the Intel Profusion chipset at its core. When the ProLiant 8500 began shipping in August 1999, it was the first server that used the Profusion architecture.The Profusion chipset has since proven itself as a leader in the symmetric multiprocessing space (www.nwfu sion.com, DocFinder:1422).
The latest iteration of the ProLiant 8500 that we tested came with 4G bytes of RAM and eight 700-MHz Pentium III Xeon processors with ZM bytes of cache.Along with the server, we received a Compaq RAID Array 4100 loaded with eight hard drives.
We ran the same performance tests against the Compaq 8500 as with the eight-processor Dell 8450 (see "How We Did It; www.nwfusion.com, DocFinder:1434).The difference in processor rates (Compaq's 700 MHz vs. Dell's 550 MHz) and RAM (Compaq's 4G bytes vs. Dell's 2G bytes) pushed the outcome in...