Dell 
Dell PowerEdge M610 Technical Guide       11 
 
5  Power, Thermal, Acoustic  
5.1 Power Supplies 
See the PowerEdge M1000e Technical Guide for information on power supplies and power supply 
specifications.  
5.2 Power Efficiency 
One of the main features of blade servers is enhanced power efficiency. The Dell™ PowerEdge™ M610 
achieves higher power efficiency by implementing the following features: 
•  User-configurable power options through the M1000e Chassis Management Controller (CMC) 
(see the M1000e documentation online at Dell.com/Support for further details)  
•  Improved power budgeting  
•  Voltage Regulator (VR) efficiency improvements  
•  Processor VR dynamic phase shedding  
•  Switching regulators instead of linear regulators  
•  Closed loop thermal throttling  
•  Use of DDR3 memory (lower voltage compared to DDR2)  
•  Memory VR static phase shedding  
•  BIOS Power/Performance options page 
•  Active Power Controller (BIOS-based processor P-state manager)  
•  Ability to throttle memory  
•  Ability to disable a processor core  
•  Ability to turn off embedded NICs when not being used  
•  Energy Smart components at the M1000e chassis level to selectively enable more computing 
performance with less power consumption.  
5.3 Thermal Operating and Storage Specifications 
The M610 thermal solution includes: 
  Optimized airflow impedance for individual blade and chassis level airflow balancing 
  Custom air baffling directs airflow through the components to maintain proper cooling 
  Custom designed heat sinks maintain processor, DIMM, and board-level chip temperatures 
within thermal design targets 
  Highly Optimized Fan Control Algorithm 
o  Base fan speeds are a function of hardware configuration and ambient temperature to 
minimize airflow for a given environment. 
o  Component algorithms: CPU PID, DIMMs, HW Configuration, IOH, GPU, and External 
Ambient.  
o  The highest fan speed request from the above algorithms is used to set the 
appropriate fan speed for the blade. 
o  Ambient and HW Configuration sets the minimum – other algorithms increase fan speed 
to maintain proper cooling. 
Thermal specifications for the PowerEdge M610 are detailed in Table 3 along with other important 
operating and storage information.