You might have missed the fact that the motherboard they use has built-in dual 10G Ethernet: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9SRH-7TF.

You might have missed the fact that the motherboard they use has built-in dual 10G Ethernet: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9SRH-7TF.cfm http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9S... Once you account for the cost of a 10G NIC and the fact that having it integrated frees up another expansion slot, I'd say it's a pretty good deal. Also, I'm not sure if there are any non-Xeon processors that support ECC.