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World Exclusive Preview of IWill's ZMAXdp

by Ryszard Sommefeldt on 23 September 2004, 00:00

Tags: IWILL

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qa3m

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Specification

It's fairly obvious what the unit's main specification is, but I'll outline it here for completeness.

IWill ZMAXdp
CPU Support All AMD Socket 940 processors, 2 sockets. Opteron 2xx CPUs needed for dual-CPU operation
Northbridge NVIDIA nForce3 250
Memory Support 2 slots, DDR400, 2GB max, dual-channel, registered
AGP 8X
PEG16X None
Southbridge N/A
Audio Realtek ALC655 CODEC from nForce3 250 feed
Audio Connectivity 6 port backplane speaker
PCI 1 x 32-bit 33MHz PCI 2.1 slot
PCI Express None
IDE 2 ATA133 compliant ports from nForce3 250
IDE RAID Both ports, RAID0, RAID1, RAID0+1
SATA 2 ports from nForce3 250
SATA RAID Both ports, RAID0, RAID1, RAID0+1
Networking Marvell Alaska ® 88E1111 (Single-Port) Transceiver, 10/100/1000Mbit. InProcomm IPN2120 802.11b Wi-Fi wireless Ethernet networking
USB nForce3 250, 4 x backplane USB2.0, 4 x front panel I/O USB2.0
FireWire FireWire400, 1 x front panel port, from Texas Instruments TSB43AB22PDT PHY
Other I/O PS/2, 1 x Serial
Possible Storage 1 optical and 3 HDD, or 1 optical, 2 HDD and a floppy drive

I can only see users asking why there's no digital audio input or output. The ALC655 supports S/PDIF input and output, but IWill don't provide the hardware necessary to use the functionality. Otherwise it's pretty feature packed, not least in the support for two Opteron processors.

You get built in, upgradeable WiFi, 5.1 surround sound, RAID on all disk ports, PCI and AGP slots, support for three hard disks internally, all eight USB2.0 ports, an external SATA port and powered FireWire400. What more do you want?

IWill are cagey about future revisions of the ZMAXdp in terms of features, so I can't speculate either way, but the current revision certainly presses the vast majority of a geek's, power user's and workstation user's happy buttons, wouldn't you say?