Build, Integration and Ease Of Use
Just a quick page on actually using the ZMAXdp in a putting-it-all-together sense, along with a bit on how well it appears to be integrated.Since the unit came pre-assembled and setup, I had to pull it apart to see how it all fits together, and that's possibly a better way of examining integration of all the parts into such a small interior space, especially since I had no manual to help me take it apart and put it back together again.
Even without a manual, it was obvious where to start and simple to evaluate how it all fits together. There's only two major functional components you can manipulate in the ZMAXdp; the drive cage and its sub-assembly, and the coolers for the CPUs.
That the drive cage hinges out is a major boon as far as this reviewer is concerned. Combined with two retained thumbscrews (screws that don't physically come free aafter you've unscrewed them) and you have an easy to manipulate, main cage for all your disk devices. Getting the disk drive cage off is a ten second task, with one retained thumbscrew for that. With that separated, you use a screw driver to reattach or dettach drives to or from their respective cages. It's very easy to work with, drive-wise.
Then you've obviously got a very well designed cooling system for the processors. The cooling for the CPUs is key to the ZMAXdp actually working properly. It's not a particularly small SFF chassis, so that afforded its designers the easy room to build a cage assembly that takes up to three internal 3.5" HDDs, as well as an optical drive. But unless you go very large on the chassis, the cooling for the CPUs is far more important, precisely because there's two of them and there's not much space left in there. Cooling a single CPU in the ZMAXdp would be a piece of cake, but you need to arrange the CPUs on the mainboard sufficiently close together so that ideally one or, in the case of the ZMAXdp, two compact heatsinks can be used.
The CPU's linear layout on the mainboard allowed IWill's engineers to fit a compact, two-piece cooler that although heavy due to its use of copper, isn't unweildy or difficult to manipulate inside the chassis. Finally, the multi, stacked-fin design of the main heatsink assembly, combined with heatpipes, allow them to handle any current Socket 940 available today, in terms of heat output.
Without going too over the top, building a ZMAXdp is child's play. The heatspreaders on the CPUs mean you don't have to be painstakingly careful with the heatsinks when you fit them, a good thing since there's not much room and they're heavy. Drives are simple to fit.
Cabling is therefore the last thing to consider. Armari assure us that the majority of the cabling work is done by IWill before the unit is ever packaged for sale. In the sample I have, everything is neat and tidy, despite there being plenty of slack in all but the Molex cable runs. Cables are run round the edges of the chassis' internal structure, cable ties are used sparingly but cleverly and there's plenty of finger room to manipulate the cables you need at their end points. That even applies to the SATA cables, whos connectors on the mainboard aren't in the easiest of places to reach. Cables have right-angled end points when needed and everything appears to be well considered.
The integration work in the ZMAXdp is excellent. Dual Opterons feel like they were made to be housed in such a small space, the coolers and the disk cage fitting together nicely, while still leaving plenty of room to work in and for air to flow. IWill have spent over a year on the design and integration of the ZMAXdp, and it certainly shows.
Ten out of ten for that, as I'm sure you'll agree. Shuttle raised the bar with its HDD integration in the P-Series. IWill manage that, plus dual processors, in the ZMAXdp.
