DELL PowerEdge R740xd 12LFF 2x Xeon Platinum 8160 128GB rack server

Capacity and compute density

The Dell PowerEdge R740xd is a 2U rack server with twelve 3.5-inch drive bays and dual Xeon Platinum 8160 processors running at 2.1GHz. It ships with 128GB of DDR4 ECC registered memory and a PERC H730P RAID controller. The system includes a 10GbE 2-port 562T adapter and dual 1100W power supplies.

Suited workloads and limits

This configuration targets storage-heavy workloads such as software-defined storage, backup targets and dense virtualisation clusters that benefit from high core counts and large drive capacity. Buyers who need more than two processor sockets, faster network links than 10GbE, or a smaller chassis should consider other platforms. The server arrives without drives installed, so storage media must be sourced separately.

Deciding specification

The twelve 3.5-inch bays set the maximum raw storage ceiling and dictate rack-space efficiency for this model. With 24 cores per processor and 33MB cache per CPU, the 8160 delivers the compute throughput to saturate those bays in parallel workloads. If the application requires fewer bays or a different drive form factor, a different chassis variant is the appropriate choice.