Supermicro serves up home kit

SUPERMICRO IS KNOWN for its servers, but since this is CES, they had to show something consumer-oriented. They did, along with a new workstation based on the x58 chipset.



The first one is a called the 5046A-XB, and as I am sure you can tell from the name, it is aimed at the SOHO server market. It has four things going for it, size, tool-free everything, low noise and high efficiency. On top of that, it also sports two PCIe 16x slot in case you want to do more than serve files. If you think of it simply as a mini-tower PC, you won't be far off.

When the enginners at Supermicro says tool-free, they really mean it. The case opens without tools, the drive bays swivel out, and the drives are in sliding cages. The noise part was hard to tell in a crowded convention center, but it wasn't noticeable. Lastly the PSU is 80+ Bronze certified meaning it is 85 per cent efficient over its operating range.

If you were wondering, it is based on the C7X58 motherboard, has four internal drive bays to match the four SATA ports, and two 5.25" bays as well. It takes any i7 CPU, so this makes it a high-end product for now, but that will change really soon. You could make quite a decent office or gaming machine out of one.



The big brother to the 5046A-XB is called the 5035L-iB, and it is based on the X7SLM-L motherboard. If you are familiar with Supermicro's pedestal servers, this is the first of the next generation design.

It also has four SATA ports, but can do RAID unlike the 5046A-XB. This one only has one PCIe 16x slot, with another 4x slot beside it, about what you would expect from a micro-ATX board. If you like pain, it also has an Intel GMA950 integrated GPU, or Motherboard GPU to use Nvidia marketing stupidities.

Other than that, it also has an 80+ Bronze PSU, with 865W as standard, 465W as an option. This is a bit up from the last generation's PSUs, they were in the 7xxW range. To round off the package, there are two USB ports, two old school PCIs, GigE, and a lonely IDE plug. µ