Dell PowerEdge R420 Technical Guide - Page 24

7 Networking and PCIe The Dell PowerEdge R420 offers balanced, scalable I/O capabilities, including integrated PCIe 3.0 capable expansion slots. The R420 supports up to 2 PCIe slots. Embedded NIC controller The R420 system board has one embedded NIC controller. The Broadcom 5720 Gigabit NIC chip is connected to the platform controller hub through a PCIe 2.0 x2 link. The Broadcom 5720 is a 14th generation 10/100/1000BASE- T Ethernet LAN controller solution suitable for high- performance server applications. The Broadcom 5720 combines dual triple- speed IEEE 802.3 compliant Media Access Controllers (MACs) with dual 10/100/1000 Ethernet transceivers (PHYs), selectable individually per port, a network controller- sideband interface (NC- SI), and an on- chip memory buffer in a single device. The device provides a PCIe 2.1- compliant interface, which operates at 5 GT/s or 2.5 GT/s x2 link width. PCIe expansion The R420 provides expanded PCIe slot capability over the previous servers. This is made possible by the 24 PCIe lanes available from each processor in the system. Dell designed the R420 to be PCIe 3.0- compliant in order to take full advantage of the processor capabilities. PCIe slots PCIe connectivity is integrated with the processor in that the number of processors in a system impacts the number of PCIe slots and the bandwidth of each PCIe slot. Table 14 lists the slot configurations for the R420. Table 14. PCIe slot configurations One processor Two processors PCIe slot 1 PCIe x8 connector with x4 bandwidth; half- length, half- height, 2.0 (from PCH) PCIe x16 connector with x16 bandwidth; half- length, half- height, 3.0 (from CPU2) PCIe slot 2 PCIe x16 connector with x16 bandwidth; half- length, full- height, 3.0 (from CPU1) PCIe x16 connector with x16 bandwidth; half- length, full- height, 3.0 (from CPU1) Storage slot Storage slot for PERCs H310, H710, or H710P 24 PowerEdge R420 Technical Guide