IWill ZMAXdp Sneak Peak

Interest in IWill's ZMAXdp content creation SFF box has been immense since its unveiling in recent days. We've held off with commentary on the little box of tricks for one reason. Exclusive shots of the unit, the cooler for the processors and the motherboard being used.

The Motherboard

Firstly, a little information on the custom form-factor ZMAX-DP motherboard. You'll clearly be able to see the pair of S940 sockets inline for cooling with a single cooling unit, the nForce3 250 Pro bridge, two DDR DIMM slots and the server-style ATX power connectors. What's not obvious is the built in WiFi hardware and the VIA VT6306 Fire II PCI FireWire400 controller, a 4-port implementation of both PHY and link interface, for the unit's FireWire and WiFi capabilities. The cute little fin on top of the existing press shots is the WiFi antenna.

Motherboard

A pair of regular ATA ports are present, along with two SATA ports near the AGP slot. Single AGP and PCI slots round off the expansion support.

The Cooler

The cooler is a joint two-piece unit that combines a aluminium heat-plate interfaces with a pair of copper heatpipe coolers. The plates move CPU heat to the copper heatpipe coolers, the heat from which is then exhausted from the rear of the unit.

Coolers

The coolers are screwed to the motherboard using familiar spring loaded screws. Two fans are mounted behind the copper fins, drawing heat out of the system, exhausting it to the ambient air in the room. All Opteron processors that dissipate up to 89W of heat are supported. Currently that means a maximum of Opteron 250, the 246, 248 and 250 all sharing the same 89W TDP figure.

The Chassis

The chassis uses a fold out drive bay mechanism to support the external expansion bays and the internal hard drive space.

Chassis

The power supply and CPU cooling fans integrated into the same unit, the ZMAXdp using an FSP Group 250W unit to power all components in the system.

Summary

While the photographs don't give the entire game away, the basic construction, motherboard layout and cooling system are clear to see. My personal concerns lie in routing the power cable to the port under the cooling unit, but it appears to be quite the engineering showcase. Cramming dual Opteron into such a form factor is impressive, the Opteron itself lending the largest helping hand to such a design, it's thermal characteristics making it possible.

The ZMAXdp is sampling at the end of July and IWill will be showing it off at Computex soon.

Find the official website here.

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:woowoo::rockon:

I wouldn't like to try running two 250s and an NV40 from that 250W PSU:shocked2:. Surely that's going to be a bit of a hindrance to a workstation user? I'm thinking that a custom right-angle ATX plug is going to be needed, too.

Presumably the memory is controlled via one processor, with the other one accessing it via the HT bus? The MSI board with that configuration doesn't seem to be unduly hamstrung by the arrangement:).

The lack of SATA seems to be utterly insane, perhaps they'll revise the design before it goes into production.

Rich :¬)

This is an EARLY pics - but the SATA thing doesnt make sense

I think that the HT bus will have enough speed :)

Everyone mocked Shuttle for the 200W PSUs - theirs works :) I dont doubt this system.

Is the fin on the top of the case in the pics on iwill.com.tw a wireless antenna?

Did you read the article? :P yes.

I wonder if it's a mockup board? There's no mounting holes for a chipset cooler which seems odd to me:inquisiti.

There also don't look to be any obvious silk screen marks for SATA ports:(.

Oh, I love speculating over fuzzy pictures of unreleased hardware:rockon::).

Rich :¬)