Specifications

The Dell PowerEdge T420 offers balanced, scalable I/O capabilities, including integrated PCIe 3.0
capable expansion slots. The T420 supports up to six PCIe slots.
The T420 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 x 2 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 5GT/s or 2.5GT/s x2 link width.
The T420 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 T420 to be PCIe
3.0-compliant in order to take full advantage of the processor capabilities.
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. For a system with one
processor, five of the PCIe slots are available. For a system with two processors, all six slots are
available.
The T420 supports a variety of PCIe expansion cards. Table 15 lists the supported add-in NICs and
HBAs for the T420.
Type
Adapter
1Gb/10Gb NICs
Broadcom 5720 Dual Port 1Gb Base-T
Broadcom 5719 Quad Port 1Gb Base-T
Intel I350 Dual Port 1Gb Base-T
Intel I350 Quad Port 1Gb Base-T
Broadcom 57810S Dual Port 10Gb Base-T
Broadcom 57810S Dual Port 10Gb SFP+
Intel X520 Dual Port 10Gb SFP+