My Sun Ultra 40 workstation showed up ready for work with twin, dual-core 2.4GHz Opteron 280s and 8GB of ECC DDR-SDRAM (the system supports up to 16GB). It also packed twin 500-GB SATA drives. (The Ultra 40 supports RAID 0 and RAID 1.)
The Ultra 40 comes preloaded with Sun Solaris 10 and a raft of developer tools including Java Studio Creator and Enterprise, Sun Studio, NetBeans, and a license for Sun’s N1 Grid Engine software. You can order Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and the Ultra 40 supports Windows XP Professional 32- and 64-bit, although the Ultra 40 doesn’t ship with Windows installed. I tested the system using 32-bit Windows XP, my standard working environment.
 | | Sun Ultra 40 Workstation. |
Sun sent along one of its 20.1-inch flat-panel LCD monitors. This monitor is very sweet: bright, crisp, and contrasty. I’m a CRT bigot, but this monitor looked great, even sitting right next to my 22-inch LaCie CRT. A Solid Case I love the Ultra 40’s case; it’s big, plain, and solid. There’s no consumer frou-frou here; a single green LED on the front of the metal case tells you if it’s turned on. The front is mostly grill for better airflow. At the top are two high-speed USB and two FireWire ports, headphone and microphone jacks, a power button, and a slim eject button beneath the slot-load DVD-RAM drive.
Likewise, the back is entirely perforated grillwork except for the actual plugs, ports, and card slots. The Ultra 40 has two PCI slots, two PCIE (PCI-Express) x16 slots, and two PCIE x4 slots, as well as 5-channel sound, coax in and out, and another six high-speed USB ports. Everything’s clearly labeled (e.g. PCIE #1: ME:X16 EE:X16); even the keyboard has a pointer to its online documentation stuck underneath.
The mammoth 1000-watt power supply sits at the very bottom, an unusual arrangement, but one which helps the balance of the unit and puts the power cable right on the floor or desktop.
Sun brags about how quiet this system is, but we’ve heard that before. In fact, when I first powered the unit on, the fans sounded like they were preparing for take-off. However, after what turned out to be a power-up test, they settled down to nearly inaudible. I got the unit to kick out some noticeable heat as I put it through its paces, but it never got appreciably louder. As Luck Would Have It The same week my review unit arrived, I began a project rendering photorealistic animations for a new prototype computer. The deadline was super-short and there simply wasn’t time to render all the animation called for. Fortunately, I remembered the Ultra 40 waiting to be unpacked.
I set up the system and set it to work grinding out frames. Then panic really set in; the Ultra 40’s initial render times were virtually identical to those of my Dell 2.8GHz Pentium IV: about 125 seconds/frame compared to about 130. Eventually, remembering that I had four processor cores to work with, I tweaked LightWave’s multithread settings, knocking render times down to 54 seconds: better, but not as good as I felt it ought to be.
 | | An interior view of the Sun Ultra 40 workstation. |
I finally went for brute force, running four single-threaded instances of LightWave. Each merrily churned out a frame every 125 seconds, giving me a composite speed of ~31 seconds per frame.
Some tasks were much faster right out of the box: loading huge, 785,000-component IGES file into Rhino took 13 minutes, versus 46 minutes on my Dell. And it loaded while two instances of LightWave were happily churning out frames at undiminished speed.
We are obviously on a cusp here, folks. There’s a lot of horsepower here, but your applications may not take proper advantage of all of it. Windows XP Pro 32-bit does a mediocre job of supporting multiple processors. Sun’s own Solaris, presumably, does much better, and Windows Vista promises improved multiprocessor support.
Still, for now, multiple and dual-core processors can be difficult to fully exploit. Even so, the multitasking capabilities are impressive, and performance will only get better as software and operating systems evolve to better utilize multiple processors.
Part of me wishes for a single 10GHz processor, however. As Luck Would Have It, Part Deux After happily burning three CDs, the DVD-RAM drive, sensing an impending project deadline, abruptly refused to burn any more. Sun sent me out a replacement drive, and I got the chance to try a little system maintenance.
The outer case pops open with a squeeze on two comfortably large clasps, exposing a transparent inner cover that can be locked against intrusion. Inside the cover is an illustrated service guide with instructions for everything from opening the case to replacing the RAM, CPU, and motherboard (see photo below). A second set of clasps releases the inner cover.
Inside, as outside, nearly everything is labeled—e.g., Power Supply Retention Screw, etc. Three big (about 125 mm) fans are mounted in a plastic frame between the drives and the motherboard. To get at the drive, I popped this fan tray out, automatically disconnecting the fans from power. I unplugged the various power and data cables from the DVD drive, pushed the clearly labeled release latch, and the drive popped right out the front. I slid the new drive in, reversed the process, and powered the system back on. Total time: less than five minutes. No tools. No problems. This system is built for easy maintenance and it shows; it’s a joy to work inside of. Summary There’s no doubt that the Sun Ultra 40 workstation is a powerhouse. Although it’s clearly designed around Solaris (even the keyboard sports extra keys that only work under that operating system), it showed me some impressive power even running my old, 32-bit Windows. My system came with an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 (click here for a review); none of the real-world testing I did came close to taxing this brute.
The Ultra 40 starts at $2,295. The system I reviewed is the high-end model, which goes for $8,875, without monitor. You can take a virtual tour of the Sun Ultra 40, and even sign up for a free 60-day trial, by clicking here. Mark Clarkson, a.k.a. "the Wichita By-Lineman," has been writing about all manner of computer stuff for years. An expert in computer animation and graphics, his newest book is Photoshop Elements by Example. Visit him on the Web at markclarkson.com or send your comments about this article through e-mail by clicking here. Please reference "Sun Ultra, July 2006" in your message.
Sun Ultra 40 As Reviewed
• 2x AMD Opteron 280 dual core processors • 1 MB of Level 2 cache per core
• 8GB ECC (error correcting) DDR-SDRAM
• Two 500-GB Hitachi SATA drives (2TB max)
• DVD-RAM CD/DVD R/W drive
• NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 graphics accelerator
• Six USB 2.0 and two IEEE 1394a (FireWire) ports
Price: $8,875, without monitor
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Santa Clara, CA
|
