Installation and Operation (continued):
Once plugged in the power button has a subtle blue glow, and once powered up the USB ports all have a more pronounced blue glow. However, once you plug in a USB device the color changes to red.
 
Before you notice any of the lighting effects above, the first thing you will notice is the noise! The two fans inside absolutely roar at start up, but wind down once the system begins to boot into your operating system. The fans are thermally controlled, so the roar will return if the load (and heat) on the processors starts to rise again.
I bought a sound level meter a few months ago thinking I could use it in cooler reviews, but didn't realize that the device didn't register below 50 dBA. Until now I have yet to have a system that even registers on the meter, but with the fans at full speed the ZMAXdp definitely does. With the probe aimed at the front of the closed case from 1 meter I got a reading of 54 dBA. With the probe aimed at the rear of the closed case from 1 meter I got a reading of 57 dBA. Definitely loud at full speed, and unless you never plan to tax your processors, you better get used to the roar!
Performance:
Testing a system like this is rather subjective, as most people probably won't have the exact combination of processors, memory, hard drives, or video cards. Plus, what do you actually compare something like this too? I have a few dual core Pentium systems on hand, but that doesn't even seem fair. With no easy way to match this up against anything, I decided to let it go head to head with the synthetic results found in two popular benchmarking suites, Everest Ultimate Edition 2006 and SiSoft Sandra 2007.
The first six screen shots are from Everest Ultimate Edition 2006, and the two below are the results from the Memory Read and Memory Write tests. As you can see, results are provided for other systems, and it can be seen that the ZMAXdp in this configuration is quite capable of hanging with some modern, powerful systems.
 
The next two screens are from the Memory Copy and CPU Queen tests, and once again we see that the test setup has some serious muscle. Memory performance may be good, but CPU performance is really impressive.
 
The final two screen shots from Everest are from CPU based benchmarks, the CPU PhotoWorxx and the FPU Julia tests. Again, the two Opteron 270s in the ZMAXdp put up some solid numbers, only getting beat by some high-end, multi-core Intel setups which are much more modern and much more expensive.
 
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