Trilight Zone

[digital8]

By Bill O'Brien <feedback@freeos.com>
Posted: ( 2001-08-17 06:36:12 EST by )
Almost limitless configurability and great performance make the Poly ServerStation 890T a serious workstation contender. Featuring dual 1.2GHz Athlon CPUs, 512MB of DDR SDRAM, and four 40GB hard drives, the system screamed through our benchmarks. Standard service and support, however, fall a bit short for the money.

The Polywell Poly ServerStation 890T shows world-class potential as a highly customizable graphics workstation. You can configure it in a zillion different ways, which range from mere overkill to supercomputer. It can run any of a number of operating systems--including Linux, Solaris, SCO Unix, and OS/2--in either single or multiple boot environments.

Polywell tailored our evaluation unit to function as a graphics workstation running Windows 2000. The ServerStation's dual 1.2GHz Athlon CPUs, coupled with 512MB of DDR SDRAM and a Leadtek WinFast GeForce3 card, deliver performance on demand. Its Internet Content Creation scores zip it to the top of the heap--about 8 percent better than our previous best performer, the 1.7GHz Pentium 4-based ABS Performance Mega. The ServerStation also delivers the best Photoshop performance we've seen thus far, taking a mere 3.8 minutes to complete our tests. That's almost 32 percent faster than a 733MHz Apple Power Mac G4 takes to complete the same tasks.

For video encoding, however, two 1.2GHz Athlons still don't deliver the throughput of a single 1.5GHz or faster Pentium 4 processor. Furthermore, our 1.7GHz Dell Dimension reference system produced slightly better results on the SPECviewperf benchmarks, despite using a slower graphics card (GeForce2 Ultra) and having less RAM (256MB). Also keep in mind that more CPUs don't make a better gaming experience. The ServerStation can't keep up with some single-CPU systems that we've tested, including Polywell's own 1.4GHz Athlon-based 880K7-1400.

In addition to speed, graphics require tons of storage. Polywell has that problem wrapped up rather uniquely. Our system came equipped with a 3Ware Escalade 7410 Storage Switch that combined four 40GB Western Digital hard drives into a RAID array with three logical volumes, one as large as 137GB. The ServerStation includes both CD-R/RW and Zip250 drives for offloading files.

Coupled with WinFast DVD software, the DVD-ROM drive plays DVDs well. But if you're more interested in editing video than watching movies, we'd recommend replacing the DVD-ROM drive with the optional Panasonic DVD-RAM/DVD-R combo drive and adding an IEEE 1394 (FireWire) adapter with Pinnacle System Studio DV software (or even the upscale Matrox RT2500 video-editing kit). The audio subsystem, composed of a Sound Blaster Live card and a three-piece Cambridge SoundWorks PCWorks speaker system, is perfectly adequate for a graphics workstation.

The ServerStation configuration doesn't include a monitor. You can choose from several display options, ranging from a 19-inch Optiquest Q95 at the low end to a 22-inch ViewSonic flat-square tube model. For graphics and video work, we recommend the 19-inch ViewSonic PF790 or the 22-inch ViewSonic P220F.

Its huge, brushed-aluminum tower provides gobs of expansion room. Even with six drives already installed, four accessible 5.25-inch bays remain available. If you need more, you can remove the five-port USB panel installed in one of the accessible 3.5-inch bays, and you'll still have two USB ports at the rear panel. Three 64-bit PCI slots also await your upgrade pleasure, and the ServerStation's 460-watt power supply should be able to handle almost anything you could throw at it.

On the downside, Polywell's basic warranty doesn't match this class of system. It includes five-year depot labor, three-year parts, and one-year 24/7 third-party toll-free phone support. However, you can upgrade to onsite service for $75 per year for a maximum of five years.


The bottom line
A plethora of configuration options make it possible for you to turn the ServerStation 890T into the workstation of your dreams.