Sun's W2100z Dual Opteron Workstation

Putting It All Together

The immediate difference between a whitebox configuration and the Sun w2100z is the level of design and attention to detail. Our w2100z only comes with one system fan, a 120mm exhaust. An 80mm exhaust fan provides cooling inside the power supply, and each processor also incorporates 80mm fans in their design - we will go into more detail about the heatsink fan (HSF) design in the thermal section of the analysis. There are no intake fans on the workstation. Sun relies on enormous amount of passive cooling for the workstation. For example, only two hard drives may be placed in the system and they must be placed a bay apart from each other. You can see an example of this below.

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You can see from the image that alternating bays are marked for cooling rather than hard drive storage. Two hard drives may seem like the bare minimum for a performance workstation, particularly if any sort of PVR work is in order, but the fact that Sun can passively cool both drives and the rest of the machine without any intake might be a design win in itself. Also notice the somewhat unique screwless plastic rails on the drive. Pulling the green handle unclips the purple rails and allows us to slide out the drive.

As long as we are on the subject of tool-less design, we were also particularly impressed with Sun's approach to the expansion bay. Below, you can see the green retention clips holding the PCI/AGP cards in place.

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Removing an expansion card requires us to pinch the green clip from the outside of the case and then lift it up. For those of you who follow our case reviews closely, this is an excellent, well thought out design. Cable management was not as perfected as some other system builds that we have seen in the past, particularly along the power supply. While not overwhelming, Sun could use a slight bit of improvement in this area, particularly since they have gone through so much care to label and document each port and cable clearly on the system.

Although the tool-less design of the case is an excellent design win, the heavy weight of the system was surprising. The Sun website lists the shipping weight of the workstation at just under 60lbs! Most of this weight seems to stem from the all-steel construction of the case - the motherboard mounting plate seems almost to be reinforced with additional steel. Additional steel may have some passive cooling qualities, but we do not have the ability to test that theory. The aluminum front bezel deceives us into thinking that the workstation is much lighter than it really is, but then again, most people don't lug their high end workstations around after the initial setup all that often anyway.

Below you can see the standard IO specifications for the system. Again, keep in mind the included keyboard and mouse use up 2 of the 5 USB ports.

Sun w2100z System Specifications
5.25" Expansion Bays	3
3.5" Expansion Bays	4, 2 usable
Rear USB Ports	3
Forward USB Ports	2
Rear Firewire Ports	1
Forward Firewire Ports	1
On-Board Parallel Port	1
On-Board Game Port	0
On-Board Serial Ports	2
Front Audio Jacks	1 in, 1 out
Rear Audio Jacks	1 in, 1 out
SPDIF	1
Number of Fans (including CPU/chipset)	(1) 120mm exhaust (2) 80mm CPU
Power Supply	550W AcBel

Sun included various other components for our analysis of the w2100z. The included QuadroFX 3000 (~GeForceFX 5900) is important for our OpenGL SpecViewperf benchmarks, but can be upgraded fairly easily. Our FX 3000 is a dual DVI video card, but Sun includes two DVI to D-sub 15 dongles for CRT users.

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Our Sun w2100z can make use of 16GB of PC-3200 DDR by default. We are only using 4GB of buffered ECC memory as seen below. The Micron DIMMs utilize a BGA chip design.