Appro's Scorpion WH300 workstation - The Tech Report

Appro's Scorpion WH300 workstation
Opteron 246s in the house
by Geoff Gasior — 12:00 AM on November 19, 2003

Manufacturer	Appro
Model	Scorpion WH300
Price (As tested)	$4629
Availability	Now

WORKSTATIONS HAVE always held a special place in my heart. I have a thing for dual-processor systems, RAID arrays, and gobs of memory, which probably goes a long way towards explaining my crush on workstation rigs. Workstations builds don't cut corners with low-end parts, and when it comes to performance, they don't pull any punches. For a power-hungry enthusiast, it doesn't get much better than that. Of course, workstations definitely aren't cheap. They're designed for big-boy playgrounds like CAD, scientific computing, and content creation environments. There, the price premium associated with workstation platforms is justified by the improved performance and reliability that they offer.

Today, we'll be getting our workstation groove on with Appro's Scorpion WH300, a fearsome beast built around AMD's Opteron platform. With 4GB of memory, a striped Serial ATA RAID array, and a Quadro 980 XGL graphics card, the Scorpion is dressed to the nines for workstation loads. The system we'll be looking at is also packed with a couple of Opteron 246 processors running at an even 2.0GHz.

Is Appro's Scorpion WH300 a lust-worthy Opteron workstation? Read on to find out.

Processors and motherboard
First things first, let's check out the Scorpion's spec sheet. Appro offers the workstation in a number of different configurations, but this is how our test box was configured:

Dimensions	17.78" x 9.28" x 19.1"
Processors	2 x AMD Opteron 246 2.0GHz
Motherboard	Tyan Thunder K8W
Memory	8 x 512MB ATP PC2700 registered ECC DDR SDRAM (4GB total)
Storage	2 x 120GB Seagate Barracuda V SATA striped in RAID 1 array via integrated Sil3114 Serial ATA RAID controller
Optical	Sony 52x CDROM drive
PCI slots	2 64-bit 133/100MHz PCI-X slots 2 64-bit 100/66MHz PCI-X slots 1 32-bit 33MHz PCI slot
AGP slots	1 8X AGP Pro
Graphics card	PNY Quadro 980 XGL 128MB
Networking	Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet
Audio	AC'97 audio with Analog Devices AD1981B codec Analog front output, and mic and line input channels Digital S/PDIF output port (RCA)
Firewire	Texas Instruments IEEE1394a Firewire controller One rear Firewire port
USB	Three rear USB 1.1 ports
Power supply	NMB 450W power supply

There's definitely no mistaking this beast for an ordinary desktop PC. Appro will spec the Scorpion with your choice of graphics cards, hard drives, memory configurations, and Opteron 2xx processors.