AMD Athlon MP 2200+ Server Roundup - September 2002

Much to our surprise, the Enterprise G's case can be opened without any tools through the magic of thumbscrews. Other than Appro, Monarch is the only other company to opt for this extremely useful design although we should probably be thanking Enlight as it is their 4U chassis.

Click to Enlarge

Removing the top cover reveals an interior that's very much like that of a standard ATX case. Because of the 4U form factor of the chassis, you can populate any of the 6 PCI slots and 1 AGP slot on the Tyan Tiger MPX motherboard without the use of any riser cards. This reiterates one of the major benefits of a 4U solution, greater expansion capabilities. Monarch outfitted our server with two Ethernet cards, a LSI Logic SCSI controller and a basic AGP card for 2D output. The need for all of these add-in components is there because of Monarch's decision to go with the relatively bare Tiger MPX motherboard as opposed to the Thunder K7X. The benefit of the Tiger MPX is its lower cost and the fact that it will work with standard ATX power supplies, in this case a Sparkle unit was provided with the server.

Click to Enlarge

With the amount of room that's available inside a 4U chassis it's no surprise that the server relies on AMD's retail heatsinks/fans to cool the Athlon MP processors. Two large fans sit at the rear of the case to help circulate air throughout the system but that's the extent of the cooling.

Click to Enlarge

If you look closely at the first CPU socket you'll see a blue cable running underneath the heatsink; this blue cable is actually a thermistor that drives the CPU temperature display on the front of the case. The thermistor is simply placed close to the core of the CPU and thus doesn't give an accurate report on the core temperature, in fact without good surface contact with the heatsink the front-mounted temperature gauge could provide a false sense of security in the event of a fan failure. Only one of the two processors are connected to the temperature gauge; a similar method is employed to get the hard drive temperature, in this case a thermistor is taped onto the surface of one of the two SCSI drives that shipped with the system.

Click to Enlarge

Monarch made no effort to route the IDE or SCSI cables along the base or edges of the chassis but with the amount of open area in the 4U case nothing bad came of it.