NEC's new Express 5800 server has broken the TPC-E benchmark performance record with a score about 70 percent higher than the current leading machine, the Tokyo company said Tuesday.

But there's another record the company isn't as keen to promote: The server has set a new low in cost performance, significantly below the previous bottom-ranked machine.

TPC-E is a new benchmark from the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) that simulates online transactions at a brokerage. Customers generate transactions, account inquiries, and market research, and the firm interacts with the customers in the simulation. Like other benchmarks, it is intended to provide a meaningful and comparable measurement of how a server responds under load. To date, benchmarks on eight machines are available.

The NEC Express 5800 scored 1,126.49 transactions per second (tpsE) during the test, which is 70 percent higher than the Unisys ES7000, according to the results.

When ranked by cost performance, the NEC machine comes in at $2,771.79 for each of those transactions per second measured. That's more than three times the top-cost-performing Dell PE2900, which ranked at $788.69 per tpsE, and far below the next-to-bottom-ranked IBM Blade Center HS21 XM at $1,897.66 per tpsE.

The system being tested cost a cool $3.1 million.

It had 32 dual-core Intel Itanium 9150N processors running at 1.6GHz for a total of 64 processor cores. There was 512GB of memory, and it was running Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 for Itanium and the SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition for Itanium database software. It will be available from Aug. 30 this year.