24 PowerEdge R420 Technical Guide
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 14
th
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
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