Dell EMC PowerEdge T40 is a low-cost and low-power SMB and SOHO server that is the first server to utilize the Intel Xeon E-2200 series.
This is just a re-badging of the Precision 3630 workstation which has been available for some time. The option selection during ordering of this system is very odd - adding option A requires unrelated option B which was required by option C. Changing anything in the configurator will likely trigger some alerts that you need to change some other option. As an example, when I ordered this system, selecting a 1TB M.2 SSD required selecting "2TB or greater system boot disk".
You can have up to 4 hard drives (the top carrier is a 2 x 2.5" carrier in that case) plus the M.2 if you don't have an optical drive (as there are only 4 SATA ports on the motherboard). If you have the optical drive, you are limited to 3 hard drives plus the M.2.
The workstation variety of this system can be ordered with a variety of video cards, in single or dual configurations. If you do that, you need one of the beefier power supplies, which comes with dual PCIe power connectors. A nice touch is that if you don't order the additional hard drives, the SATA and power cables come pre-installed. You still need to find the drive trays, but at least you don't need to have a scavenger hunt to find the correct length of right-angle SATA data cables and a SATA power splitter.
I'm not sure why they allow 2 high-performance graphics cards in the system as the 2nd one would only have the PCIe x4 slot available to it. Note that the cards offered are workstation-class (good for render, not so good for gaming, at least not at 7680 x 2160). In my case the upper PCIe x4 slot has an Intel X550-T1 card with the bottom PCIe slot left empty for airflow purposes. I find it odd that Dell doesn't offer a 10GbE card option for this system. That leaves only the legacy PCI slot open. As I needed IEEE 1394 in this system, that slot ended up with a TI-chipset 1394 card.
I am using the PS/2 connectors. I have a DEC (actually HPaqital) LK461 keyboard connected there, and my Microsoft Intellimouse is also connected via its optional green PS/2 adapter. That is to keep the rear USB slots open for other things. The USB3 slots have the USB3 from 2 BenQ PD3220U monitors, a Lexar CF/SD reader (the system reader is SD-only), and a film scanner. The USB2 slots are used for a Wacom tablet and the APC UPS. The monitor USB slots on one monitor are used for a pair of spectrophotometers (one for monitor calibration and one for printer calibration). The USB slots on the other monitor are unused. Both monitors have hotkey pucks, but those connect to a dedicated USB port on each monitor and aren't seen by the host system.
This system replaced an old Optiplex 9020 with an X540-T1 card (being x8, it wasn't usable in the new system). The monitor was also upgraded from a Dell U3011 to the dual BenQ 3220's. I re-used the 1394 card from the 9020 in the new system.
I ordered the system with 32GB of ECC memory (the issue that precipitated this upgrade was continual memory errors in the 9020, so ECC was a must), a 1TB class 50 M.2 drive and a pair of the cheapest 500GB SATA drives offered (as I planned on installing a pair of 1TB 860 EVO drives as secondary storage). Before I received this system, I saw a Dell 1TB class 60 m.2 drive on eBay for under $100 new, so I bought that and swapped the card out before powering on the system for the first time (I always do an install from scratch to avoid the usual "shovelware" that comes pre-loaded on systems).
This system is restricted to Windows 10 or newer (Workstation Pro > 4 cores license), at least when used with the E2-2200 series CPUs - a Windows 7 SP1 disc hangs on boot while displaying the orb. This is rather unpleasant, but I am working on ways to make things look more like Windows 7. Presumably the Poweredge version of this system requires a Windows Server license (if ordered with Windows) and doesn't have the choice of graphics cards that the workstation has.
