Sun Microsystems has a powerful and favorably priced entry in the x86 workstation space with the Ultra 27. Such is the power of this workstation and its natural fit for *nix workloads, combined with a compelling price tag, I pronounce it the Ultimate Linux Workstation in its class. He’s a short overview and review as well as a video entry at the end.
Ultra 27 Front View
The Ultra 27 is a single socket system but packs a powerful quad core punch. With the Nehalem Xeon (similar to the consumer Core i7), markets that used to demand dual socket systems can now comfortably look to cheaper single socket alternatives. With the return of HyperThreading, the chip handles 8 hardware threads and unlike its previous guise in the Pentium 4, HT contributes noticeably and favorably to performance. Due to the extreme performance and number of execution threads, I think the Nehalem Xeon represents a paradigm shift where most high end systems will no longer carry two discrete CPUs.
The Ultra 27 competes in the same league as the Lenovo ThinkStation S20, HP Z400, Mac Pro Quad and various other boutique workstation manufacturers. Through channel vendors, all but the Mac can be comfortably configured for around $2000.
The price of this system is attractive and affordable to anybody who makes their livelihood off of professional computing. The components on a workstation like this are well engineered and thoroughly tested together. 3rd party vendors will also commonly certify software and hardware against popular workstation offerings. The Ultra 27 is comfortably expandable and can be equipped with Intel’s best CPUs on the market, plenty of disk, and high end graphics. With two PCIe2 16-lane slots and ample cooling and power, the Ultra 27 has a lot to offer anyone in digital content creation, CAD, CAM, CAE or other visualization activities. With the speedy Nehalem chip and 4 disk bays programmers doing large builds or staging large applications should be more than content.
Ultra 27 Rear View
The Ultra 27 comes in a robust light gray case. The Spartan design is free of all the unsightly plastic that usually adorns HP machines and looks more substantial than either the Lenovo or HP competition. The interior isn’t quite as beautiful as the Mac Pro’s, but there is plenty of room and the internal drive bay keeps any need for user cable management to a minimum.
Ultra 27 Inside Overview
My configuration is as follows:
- Intel Xeon w3570 Quad Core at 3.20GHz (has intel Turbo Boost to 3.46GHz)
- 6GB RAM ECC DDR3-1333
- nVIDIA Quadro FX 380 graphics
- 500GB 7200 RPM SATA hard disk
Ultra 27 Drive Bay
I am upgrading from a previous IBM IntelliStation A Pro which had two physical single core AMD Opteron CPUs. The increase in performance is remarkable.
It is noteworthy that this system is much quieter than my previous. Indeed, the large fan is seldom audible even under heavy load. The heat output is negligible and the components have never been more than warm to the touch even after hours of maximal CPU usage.
Ultra 27 Main Board
The case is for the most part toolless and very clean and spacious inside. Every aspect of the system can be easily upgraded so the Ultra 27 should be a good investment and grow with time and requirements.
Ultra 27 Case Diagram
With well engineered hardware and plenty of power, the Ultra 27 is awesome as a general UNIX-class workstation. I am happily running Gentoo and even the largest builds are a cakewalk for this box. I push my computer harder than most people. Commonly running several browser instances loaded with tabs, several terminals, email, music, the Eclipse IDE, and more, interactivity has not diminished even when running parallel compiles.
I’ll conclude that anyone looking at the Mac Pro should consider the alternative in machines like the Sun Ultra 27. This computer represents a latest in a powerful linage of Sun workstations and is ideal for just about any demanding workload you can throw at it.
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Very nice, great workstation. Why not put the workstation on the floor though? I’d be a little worried that it would fall down on me :).
Thanks for this detailed review. I enjoyed reading it and I envy you having such a workstation !
By the way, really interesting blog. Keep up the good job. I will add your link to my blog.
GET BACK TO WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORK!!!!! Awesome video dude! :)
Good review, I’m also interested in the Ultra. I have a few questions, if you don’t mind.
– Are there any markings on the motherboard of the manufacturer? I think I recall some of the former Ultras used Tyan-sourced boards, is it also the case here?
– What is the case made of? Photos suggest a steel frame and plastic cover, can you confirm this?
– Cooling seems rely on a single 120mm rear fan (and the PSU), is this correct? There appears to be a front fan cutout under the HDD cage, can you confirm? What diameter is it? Are there other front fan openings?
@aef
It uses an AMI bios if that is of any help. I don’t see Tyan markings. If you find the OEM, I’d be interested.
The case is steel with a battleship gray paint coat. The front bezel is plastic with a metal honeycomb inlay.
There is a template for one 120mm fan up front but I don’t see a power header anywhere. It would be aligned to cool the PCIe slots. I don’t see weakness in the stock cooling but this might be of interest to overclock GPUs.
The case fan is very loud here, varying between the individual machines.
The problems seems to be the lack of sensors exposure to the OS (Windows, Linux), not the temperature.
The hdd bays are very hard to use. The hdd usually get stuck when inserting
them into the bays. It has only power for one PCI-E graphics card.
A GTX-285 fits but you need to remove the plastic thingy that is supposed
to fix the card.
This now seems to be the “top” line of Sun/Oracle in Workstations.
Most Gamer PCs will probably out do this, let alone a Mac Pro.
Hi Andy,
I haven’t tried Windows but it is very quiet in Linux and I don’t have any sensor programs running — even under 8 threads full throttle for hours. Make sure to check the BIOS and that you have speedstep and such enabled. Make sure your Windows install has all the Intel platform drivers installed as well.
My system also has 2 graphics power outlets. Perhaps there is some variance in power supplies?
A gaming system with an extreme edition CPU will be essentially the same minus ECC memory. Likewise, you could put a consumer GPU in the Sun to sweeten the price/performance if the opengl cards aren’t important to you. The Mac pro is a lot more expensive, but you also have the option of a dual socket workstation which Sun doesn’t offer at the moment.
I own one of these. I bought it with a 3.33 GHz W3580 Xeon, 500 GB DISK, 2 GB RAM., the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800 graphics accelerator card and a DVD drive.
The 500 GB disk is a hitachi enterprise grade disk. I managed to buy another identical disk from elsewhere, then use the two of them in a mirror. Sun sold a 1 TB disk for this machine too, which again was Hitachi. I found that Hitachi had a later range of enterprise grade disks, which was based on the ones in the Ultra 27, but the new range went to 2 TB. So now my machine has 2 x 2 TB disks which I use for data storage (mirrored) and 2 x 500 GB which I use for the operating system (OpenSolaris).
I bought the extra 10 GB RAM from Crucial – a lot cheaper than getting it from Sun,
One thing to note is that the memory speed is 1333 MHz, but that drops to 1067 (or something similar, I forget the exact figure), if the machine is fitted with more than 6 GB RAM.
I believe it is possible to get 4 GB modules which will fit this, so you can in practice fit 24 GB, though 12 GB is the maximum supported RAM,
I agree it is great workstation. As you say, it is very quite. I find it gets a bit more noisy if I set up large parallel compiles with 12 threads.
It’s not build to the same sort of engineering standard as the SPARC workstations like the Sun Ultra 80, Blade 1000, Blade 2000 etc, but it is decently made.
I used it to replace a Blade 2000 SPARC system. This uses less power, is much faster and is much quieter, though I still use the Blade 2000 for development where I need SPARC processors.
It cam with Solaris 10 when I got it, but I wiped that and put OpenSolaris 06 2009.
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