A Closer Look

Courtesy of Storage Studio, the Sim Lim Square Retail shop where you can catch glimpses of very unique and niche products, we got to play with a very special PC product... a fully configured IWILL ZMax d2. Now, what exactly is an IWILL ZMax d2? Essentially, it is IWILL's successor to the ground-breaking ZMAXdp, the world's first dual CPU small form factor (SFF) system. And as if dual processors aren't pushing it, it supports SLI for dual video cards operation.

Let's take a look at the SFF in more detail.

A very picturistic box with the cooling technology explained on it.

In Aluminum silver, it is sleek and simple. The 4 small slots infront are actually USB slots for easy hook-up of your USB devices. The button infront at the middle is quite obviously the power-on button.

 

You can see that at both sides of the SFF, whole row of slits line up the bottom sides. This is for the intake of ambient air to cool the insides.

The Lights and all

Taking a look from behind, we see the colorful I/O shield. The beefy power supply protrudes out of the back of the SFF a bit as it is a big guy that is supposed to be able to cope with dual Opterons and dual display cards in SLI.

The power supply unit is made by Teamgreat Technology and is rate at 380w. It supplies 22.5A for the +12v rail so it should be able to handle the dual Opterons, but to add 2 power consuming 7800GTs into the equation, there can be no certainties until tested.

 

 

The cool thing about the thumbscrews that come with the SFF is that they are stay-on thumbscrews that do not fall off when unscrewed but simply hang there.

 

When the SFF is powered up, the 4 USB slots in the front lights up in cool blue.

 

And when a USB device is plugged in, this blue light changes to red:

 

This is a very nice touch to enhance the looks of a simple design I feel.

The Internals

Let's open her up and take a look at the internals!

Here, you see the Opterons side by side, each being cooled by a heat-pipe cooler with full copper fins.

The main heatsink on the the processor is actually rather flat to keep the whole setup low profile. To be able to cope with the heat-load from the CPUs, the main heatsink needs to transfer the heat away quickly and this is done via the copper heat-pipes, 3 from each main sink. The heat pipe from one processor bends to the left while the other to the right.

 

The pipes pass on the heat to a tower of neatly and tightly pack copper fins. The end result is you get 2 tower of copper fins next to each other. And to dissipate the heat from the fins, air flow pulled through them is used. And where does this hot air go?

Well, they exhaust out to the power supply and out from the power supply into your room naturally.

 

Here you see the tight plcaement of the Video Card to the copper tower.

 

Well one of the key ingredients that go into a successful SFF is the thermal mangement due to the challenge of spcial constraints. So we definitely want to look into this and see how well the ZMax d2 handles the heat.

This was done by monitoring temperatures taken on multiple thermal probes at multiple strategic locations. You can read about this in the later part of this article.

Full Configuration & Performance Tests

Looks aside, let's take a look at the configuration of this tough guy in a pretty lady's outfit!

As you can see, we benchmarked this against a very up-to-date Desktop system running Intel Pentium 4 540 on an NForce 4 SLI board running DDR2 memory. It is not exactly a fair fight, but since SFFs are typically used at home/office, it is very natural for us to compare it against a typical PC.

All tests are carried out with settings at default.

One of the main mission during the tests was to watch out for the stability of the whole system since the heat from the dual XFX 7800GTs and the dual Opterons can easily bring about stability issues when all crammed inside a small form. That, on top of the power requirements of running dual 7800GTs... 2 x 7800GTs will surely consume a very substantial amount of power. Does the power supply have the means to keep up?

Workstation Test: CINEBENCH 2003

We start off with the benchmarks that high-light the strengths and weaknesses of a workstation as the ZMax d2 is by and large supposed to fulfill the role of a workstation.

CINEBENCH is the free benchmarking tool for Windows and Mac OS based on the powerful 3D software CINEMA 4D. The tool is set to deliver accurate benchmarks by testing not only a computer's raw processing speed but also all other areas that affect system performance such as OpenGL, multithreading and multiprocessors.

 

We see that the Pentium 4 540 3.2GHz is faster by the Dual Opterons 240 1.4GHz in most of the tests by about 6%. However, for the CPU Multiple rendering test, the IWILL ZMax actually completes that task 17% faster!

Workstation Test: Video Encoding & Editing

Next, we tested out the video encoding capability of the ZMax d2. We used Cinema Craft Encoder to encode a 3G AVI File.

 

The ZMax is about 7% slower here.

To test out the real world video editing capability of the ZMax d2, we did a Timeline export job with Adobe Premiere and compared the time it took for the Zmax to complete the task compared to the Intel 540.

The ZMax is only about 1% slower for the Adobe Premiere job.

Futuremark PC Mark 05, 3D Mark 03 & 05

PC Mark 05 includes an extensive collection of application-based tests that video encoding, audio compression, 2D user interface tasks, 2D graphics memory access, web page rendering, file decryption and encryption, memory access and text editing.

Again a very close match, less than 1% disparity between the 2 systems.

 

We decided to test out the 3D Gaming performance of this workstation which sports an SLI setup. Although a Dual Opteron system is very rarely used for gaming, the hybrid status of it in a SFF and the SLI setup makes this a very possible scenario and viable option.

All tests were run at default image quality settings.

When you lay them down together this way, the 3.2GHz Intel platform easily wins out the 1.4GHz ZMax d2. Even though the ZMax sports 2 CPUs, only 1 is being utilised for these single threaded game tests.

Unreal Tournament 2004 & Stability Test Result

Finally, we take a look at in-game performance in Unreal Tournament 2004 Benchmark.

In-game performance is surely much faster with the Intel 3.2GHz due its huge MHz advantage over the 1.4GHz ZMax d2. This is on top of the fact that the ZMax runs slower ECC memory for rock stable operation.

In order to test out the stability of the system under continous load, we let it loop 3d Mark 05 for 8 hours. This was done in a typical warm Singapore ambient of 29 degrees celcius.

At the end of the test session, we were happy to see that the system was still looping 3D Mark. This proved its stability even with Dual Opterons and Dual 7800GTs all crammed inside a SFF! This proved heat and power were no issues on the fully configured ZMax d2. But still, we were very interested to find out how good the thermal management is on the ZMax d2.

Thermal Management Testing

As mentioned earlier, we placed thermal probes at 5 strategic locations.

We placed one just about 1 cm away from the CPU heatsink to monitor the temperature of the air here.

 

We placed one in the small space between the first 7800GT and the second 7800GT,

 

We placed another one very close to the second 7800GT.

 

We had to keep the SFF case closed when doing the thermal checks so these 3 thermal probes were slid through the intake slits on the side of the case.

 

We had one thermal probe right behind the exhaust of the power supply.

 

And we had the final one up aginst the back of the casing, touching its aluminum surface.

Thermal Management Test Result

All these readings were taken to judge how good the airflow management of the SFF is. The better the airflow around the casing, the lower the difference between each of these temperatures would be. If one spot is very much higher than another, then that means that air is not circulating too well at that hot spot.

A typical SFF usually displays a roughly 20C temperature difference (temperature delta) between the internal air temperature and the ambient air. We see that this seems to apply to the ZMax as well, even though it is running 1 processor and 1 video card more than the common SFF. This is exceptionally impressive. No wonder the system runs as stable as a rock.

We see from the measurement of the 3 sections of the internals, the stalest air is the portion in between the first and second video cards. These 2 cards are literally side by side. The 7800GTs are by no means cool-running cards and being sandwiched in-between them and in a tight SFF, I am not surprised at all the temperature probe reads 10C hgiher here than the rest of the areas.

Tbe Casing back is also quite hot. IWILL designed a large part of the whole casing to help with the dissipation of heat. So the aluminum body actually acts as a large passive heatsink. If we solely relied on the rather silent fans on the power supply and the copper towers, I'm quite sure there is a high chance the user would run into heat issues.

Conclusion

Although the performance of this system is not sky-high, the impressive features, options and stability offered by it makes it very attractive. It looks good, is small in size, runs quite silently, very very stable, and versatile enough to function as both a professional workstation and a sleek home gaming/entertainment Small Form PC. I am mighty impressed by IWILL's ambitious idea of putting dual processors and dual display cards into a fully functional SFF, and pulling it off so well.

As I am a man who is very interested in the thermo-dynamic technologies applied in PCs, and I often experiment and build my own coolers, I can really appreciate the efforts and innovations IWILL put into such a challenging project. IWILL has certainly set a high standard for SFF makers to follow both in terms of technologies offered and thermal management.

Overall Rating : 90 VRMarks!

 

For those keen to take a look at it in person, do drop by Storage Studio #04-28/29 Sim Lim Square in Singapore. Trust me, you will not find this rare product anywhere else in Singapore!

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