Dell has grabbed hold of Intel's latest Xeon release and upgraded its mainstream server line, but the vendor would prefer you focus on the new PowerEdge R900 running on older chips.

The four-socket R900 server eats up 4U of rack space and stands as Dell's top performing box of all time. The server runs on Intel's four-core 7300 Series Xeon chips aimed at larger systems. Understandably, Dell reckons all this horsepower makes the R900 ideal for cranking through databases and business software.

Last but not least, Dell will ship its PowerEdge 1950, 2950 and 2900 servers with Intel's fresh four-core "Penryn" chips.

The Round Rock-based hardware maker is in the midst of revamping its server nomenclature, adding letters instead of just numbers to all its system monikers. Along with the R (rack) and T (tower) boxes announced today, Dell is soon set to release the M1000e blade chassis where the M stands for modular.

We're told that all of Dell's tenth-generation server gear will ship with a 0 in the second position of their names. Systems with one-socket will be in the 100 to 400 range, dual-socket gear will be in the 500 to 800 range and four-socket hardware will be in the 900 range. Lastly, a 0 at the end of the name represents an Intel-based box, while a 5 at the end marks an AMD-based system.

The R900 supports up to 128GB of FB-DIMMs, has seven PCI Express slots and five SAS drive bays. Meanwhile, the 1U R200 ships with a single 2.66GHz Xeon 3200 series, 3.0GHz series 3000, 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2.0GHz dual-core Pentium or 2.0GHz Celeron chip. The box supports up to 8GB of memory, has two Gigabit NICs and a riser with either one PCI-X slot and one PCI Express slot or two PCI Express slots and room for two SATA or SAS disks.

The tower T105 unit runs on a single Opteron 1000 series chip at 2.8GHz or a Sempron at 2.2GHz. It supports up to 8GB of memory, has three PCI Express slots and two drive bays for SATA or SAS disk. ®

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