AMD Opteron Coverage - Part 3: The First Servers Arrive

Appro up to Bat with the 1100H

For this review, Appro submitted one of their servers that's clearly aimed at the HPC market - the 1100H.

From the front of the 1U chassis its very evident that you're not meant to be swapping drives in and out of the system as there are no removable drive bays; in fact, there isn't even a floppy drive in the server, just a slim CD-ROM drive. While we don't necessarily agree with (or understand) the motivation behind excluding the floppy drive, we see the cost savings in not implementing removable drive bays.

The 1100H chassis is actually very similar to the 1124, which is what the majority of AnandTech servers are based off of. For those of you that aren't familiar with the design, Appro's 1124 was one of the first 1U Athlon MP servers to hit the market. Appro made very few changes to the base chassis design in order to accommodate the 2-way Opteron configuration as you'll soon see.

Externally, other than a slightly modified look, the 1100H is no different from the 1124. The server does have two front mounted USB 2.0 ports, but other than the CD-ROM drive there are only power and reset switches to be found at the front of the chassis.

The rear is home to one serial port, a VGA connector for taking advantage of the on-board ATI Rage XL video, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB 2.0 ports and the usual PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports.

Ease of accessibility has always been a strength of Appro, and the tradition continues with the 1100H; two thumbscrews secure one of three panels covering the majority of the 1U server. Removing this panel reveals the Rioworks motherboard Appro chose to use with the 1100H.