Supermicro unveils whisper-quiet (28 dB) high-end workstation at CES

Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 10, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.

The quiet (28 dB(i)) systems substantially increase overall system performance (by up to 30%), improve energy savings thanks to new highly efficient power supplies and power-saving DDR2/DDR3 memory modules, and provide optimum cooling across all CPU speeds.

“Supermicro’s 7045A-C3, 7045A-CT and 5035B-T+ SuperWorkstations all offer a new holistic whisper-quiet (28 dB) system design that implements our acoustically optimised thermal technology,” said Charles Liang, CEO and President of Supermicro. “With up to 30%(i) performance gains, 20%(i) memory-energy savings and whisper-quiet operation at below 30 dB, these systems offer our customers many benefits.”

Designed for maximum possible energy savings, the 7045A-C3, 7045A-CT and 5035B-T+ workstations feature Supermicro’s new X7DCA-3 or X7DCA-i motherboard, based on the Intel 5100 (San Clemente) chipset. Equipped with two PCI Express x16 slots, 7.1 high-definition audio and two IEEE 1394a ports, these high-end systems are an excellent choice for CAD, graphics-rendering and gaming applications. Designed for current 45 nm, 1333 MHz FSB Xeon 5400 and 5200 series processors, these highly efficient systems use affordable, economical DDR2 memory up to 667 MHz with a 20% energy saving(i) compared with FB-DIMM memory. To make disk storage easy to expand, the high-end 7045A-C3 SuperWorkstation offers eight hot-plug SAS drive bays with RAID 0, 1 and 10, plus optional RAID 5 support. The cost-effective 7045A-CT supports up to 6 terabytes (TB) of hot-plug SATA storage capacity.

For maximum graphics and storage performance in a mid-tower UP platform, the 5035B-T+ offers a quiet, efficient 465-watt power supply, two native PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots and support for DDR3 1333 MHz memory modules. PCI Express 2.0 doubles I/O bandwidth to 5 Gb/s per lane and is fully compatible with PCI-E 1.1 graphics cards. DDR3 memory modules enable data transfer of up to 1.6 Gb/s, twice the bandwidth of DDR2 (0.8 Gb/s). The 5035B-T+ is based on the Supermicro C2SBX motherboard, which supports Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Extreme, Quad and Duo processors and provides 8-channel high-definition audio, two IEEE 1394a headers and two PCI-X slots, enabling excellent connectivity to digital media and outstanding I/O bandwidth.

Supermicro’s new acoustically optimised thermal technology enables these systems to achieve 28 dB, which is considered quieter than the noise level in a whisper-quiet library.