Dell PowerEdge R740

The R740 is the 2U mainstream of Dell's 14th generation — the balance point of compute, storage and expansion that made it the default enterprise server of its era.

Knowledge pages are educational references, independent of sales inventory. Items without confirmed sourcing are reference-spec — quoted on demand.

Typical uses

General enterprise workloads, storage-heavy virtualization, GPU-light acceleration, database tiers.

Platform at a glance

CPU support	Intel Xeon Scalable 1st/2nd Gen, 2 sockets
Memory platform	24 × DDR4 slots; 2666 (1st Gen) / 2933 (2nd Gen); up to 3TB with LRDIMMs — the natural home of 32GB DDR4-2666V/2933Y RDIMMs
Drives & RAID	16 × 2.5" or 8 × 3.5" front bays · PERC H730P/H740P
PCIe & accelerators	Up to 8 PCIe 3.0 slots; supports up to 3 double-width accelerator cards (check riser & PSU configuration)
Power & networking	Dual PSU 750W–2400W · NDC networking as R640

Memory rules & limits

Same platform rules as R640: no RDIMM/LRDIMM mixing, speed follows the CPU generation, balanced channel population.

How it compares

vs R740xd: the xd trades PCIe flexibility for extreme drive density. vs R750: 15th Gen moves to Ice Lake CPUs, DDR4-3200 and PCIe Gen4.

Common buying mistakes

Quoting GPU builds without checking riser/PSU part numbers
Mixing 2Rx4 and 2Rx8 blindly across channels
Overlooking rear-bay variants when counting usable slots

Used-unit inspection checklist

Riser configuration documented
RAID controller model & cache battery
Memory population map matches invoice
Rails and bezel included if quoted

Memory for this platform

This platform takes the 32GB DDR4 ECC RDIMMs we regularly source and quote — see part numbers & availability, or ask for a free compatibility check with your RFQ.