Wow what an awesome server. The design of the chassis sings of quality and design features, it's like looking the assembly of a Ferrari F430 vs. an Aston Martin DB7, the breath of the design concepts, such as the pluggable modules are well thought and plug together like a hand in a glove.
While having a look inside the x4600, the first thing you notice is there are some of the most enormous fans you have ever seen in a server. There 4 large fans are sitting right at the front of the case. These are the only cooling fans that I can see in the entire chassis, they push the air through the vertically mounted AMD Opteron x64 CPU modules.
Behind these CPU modules is expansion space, which allows for six half-height PCI-E and two PCI-X expansion slots.
The chassis is very tidy no wires and cables hanging around really reminds me of the internals of a blade server and a very nice surprise.
Powering the x4600 are four 850-watt power supplies operating in a 2+2 redundant configuration. Although the system wouldn't power up with only two functional power supplies present, it would continue to run following the loss of the same two power supplies. This adds up to a lot of power consumption, but not as much as you expected given the server's overall performance and abundance of processors.
All these features lead me to think that this is one of the best-designed server chassis I've ever seen. Let’s hope it performs as it looks.
click here for more on the x4600