This roundup also gives us the opportunity to introduce the ZD ServerBench 4.0 test suite, which stresses all the vital subsystems that go into making a good server. After the dust had cleared, we were pleasantly surprised by the robustness of the hardware presented here. Since then, Intel's Pentium Pro processor has become the gold standard for server CPUs. In fact, many major vendors have either abandoned Pentium servers altogether or relegated them to entry-level status. It's not just the CPU that's grown up, either.
Features vary from product to product, but two trends stood out during testing.
First, while the Revolution used up a precious PCI slot for a graphics adapter, the other three had a variety of accelerator chips integrated on the motherboard. Second, the majority of systems packed their oversized boxes with a pair of 200-MHz Pentium Pro CPUs and 512K of external cache. The NetServer goes its own way by using the less expensive 256K external cache Pentium Pro processors, and its performance lagged behind the others. Of this quartet of power ser-vers, we were most impressed with the Dell PowerEdge 4100, which surpassed the others in terms of features and performance. It did so at roughly the same cost per TPS at full client load, which is the closest thing we've found to a bottom-line measurement of server value.