Another item of note: Drives are user-installable, so as larger capacities become available, newer drives can be swapped in without needing to replace the drive bays.

Moving to the back of the machine, the Xserve comes standard with two FireWire 800 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, and a DB9 serial port for console access. Inside, the built-in ATI Radeon X1300 PCI Express graphics (with 64MB of GDDR3 SDRAM) sits on a daughter card of the PCI bus, meaning a slot does not have to be given up for video. A mini video adaptor is included so you can attach a display.

Apple said it uses the mini video adapter for two reasons: to keep space requirements to a minimum and to allow for greater air flow. On reflection, it occurred to me that using the adaptor allows a user to choose either a DVI or VGA monitor. The 64MB of video RAM is enough to drive a 23-in. Apple Cinema Display.

When doing a custom order of the Xserve, the left PCI slot can be configured as a PCI-X slot for customers who have existing investments in specialty cards that use the PCI-X format.