Product Reviews

Although you can now feasibly fit a decent PC into a small-form-factor chassis, the idea of squeezing a multiprocessor workstation into the same space would seem ludicrous. Except that now it isn't. Iwill's long-awaited ZMAXdp shoehorns dual Opterons running on the nVidia nForce3 Pro 250Gb chipset into the same space as a single-processor Shuttle. Our first look at this groundbreaking chassis comes courtesy of workstation specialists Armari.

Of course, fitting so much computing power into an SFF has its drawbacks. Primary among these are the related issues of power requirements and heat dissipation. The Armari overcomes both these problems by using AMD's HE Opterons. Although in theory the Iwill ZMAXdp supports full-power Socket 940 processors, the HE version reduces the overhead. Compared to the 89W requirement of the full-power part, the HE needs just 55W. There's also an EE version that reduces power further to 30W. However, the low wattage means that for DP systems only Opteron 246 CPUs are currently available as HE parts, and only 240 CPUs as EE.

Our preview ZMAXdp was still an early model, though, and had some key differences compared to the system that Armari will be shipping in November. Primarily, our sample included two Opteron 244 HE processors, which are being phased out. These run at 1.8GHz rather than the 2GHz of the 246 HEs, which will be in the full production system.

Despite the lower-clock processors, the ZMAXdp acquitted itself well in our content creation tests. The NewTek LightWave 7.5c Lost in Space movie frame render was 25 per cent slower than a dual 3.06GHz Xeon workstation, but Xeons are able to run two threads on each processor via Hyper-Threading, so always have an advantage over Opteron systems in this test. The ZMAXdp's score is no worse than a full-sized desktop dual Opteron running full-power 244s.

The ProCoder 2 benchmark was a different story, however. The ZMAXdp completed our simultaneous transcode from DV to MPEG2 and DivX in 16 per cent less time than our reference Xeon DP workstation. We also tested the long-term stability of the system by hammering it with a utility that keeps the processors continually at 100 per cent utilisation. After 24 hours,

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it was still running without mishap.

Despite the ZMAXdp's diminutive size, Armari has still been able to include two hard disks - in this case, a pair of 160GB Hitachi 7K250s attached to the SATA channels, and configured in a RAID0 array. The drive cage sits from left to right rather than front to back, making cabling drives relatively painless.

Understandably, the interior is cramped though, with two large copper heatsinks sitting side-by-side over the two processors. These are cooled by external fans integrated into the power supply, which draw air over the sinks and out the back of the system. As this is a dual-processor workstation, the Iwill chassis has a meatier 300W power supply than the usual 200W SFF fare, and its size necessitates a considerable portion protruding from the ZMAXdp's posterior.

The Iwill ZMAX-DP motherboard has fairly limited upgrade potential. There's a single AGP slot and a single PCI slot. Armari has populated the AGP with an XFX GeForce 6800 GT, which is a good compromise between power draw and 3D capabilities. Its single-width proportions also leave the PCI slot unhindered for upgrade. There are only two RAM sockets, and Armari has split 2GB across them. This will be more than enough for most workstation apps, and is also the maximum the motherboard supports.

You won't need to add much else either, as the nForce3 chipset includes most of the peripheral devices you need, built in. Aside from providing audio, it also supplies FireWire and a gigabit Ethernet controller. However, the latter isn't the only pre-installed networking option. The natty fin on the top at the back is actually an aerial for an InProComm wireless networking chipset. It's only 802.11b, though.

There are plenty of options for external devices. An impressive eight USB 2 ports are provided - four at the front and four at the rear. The front ones are blue and change to red when a device is plugged in and operational. There's a rear SATA port for attaching an external device, and a FireWire port plus microphone and headphone sockets hiding either side of the floppy bay underneath a flap. Armari has also provided a Mitsumi 7-in-1 floppy and media card reader.

As this was a preview sample, the price hasn't yet been confirmed. However, it's already clear that there's no compromise on processing power, despite the low wattage Opterons and SFF chassis. The full production model, with its 246 CPUs, will be even faster; Iwill is even reportedly working on support for dual-core Opterons, which will be yet another incredible leap in processing power. With the Opteron's AMD64 instruction set, you've got 64-bit computing as a future option as well. Overall, the Iwill is a groundbreaking device, with the potential to change the shape - and size - of PC workstations.