Appro Scorpion WH300: a new graphics model performs well.

Appro is a respected name in the server market. The company sells high-end servers for a variety of applications. In addition, it uses its expertise in high-end computing to produce graphics workstations. The Scorpion WH300 workstation is a dual-Opteron machine with plenty of raw horsepower.

The Appro Scorpion is fairly compact and housed in a non-descript black case. On the front of the workstation reside the requisite power switches, two USB ports, a floppy, and two exposed 5-inch bays, one of which is taken up by a DVD drive. Opening a door along the front reveals a bay containing a large fan, which can be removed, and the bay filled with a five-drive, hot-swap SCSI or SATA RAID array. The back of the machine has keyboard and mouse connectors, as well as three USB, FireWire, Serial, Parallel, Gigabit Ethernet, and audio ports. I noticed that the power supply didn't have a separate on/off switch, forcing the user to unplug the system should it ever hang.

The Scorpion opens upon removing two screws and sliding off the side panel. The inside of the Appro workstation is very tidy: all the cables are tied down and routed efficiently. The motherboard is a Tyan with one 8x AGP slot and five PCI slots, all but one of which are 64-bit. The motherboard supports both Serial ATA and ATA 133 drives. Inside, there is room for up to six hard drives or the five-drive hot-swap array. The case has two large and powerful fans, and plenty of ventilation.

The workstation booted up just fine, and I must say that it is one of the quieter machines I've reviewed. The reason is probably the oversized case fans, which move plenty of air without the high-pitched whine of the smaller fans that many vendors use. The workstation was a bit misconfigured upon arrival, being loaded with Microsoft Windows Server 2003, rather than XP Professional, which is the preferred OS for high-end graphics. The two OSs are based on the same core, however, and I had no problems running graphics applications on Server 2003, though it may have impacted the benchmarks slightly.

The Appro Scorpion is the first machine I've reviewed to sport Opteron processors. AMD's first 64-bit processor, the Opteron offers a 32-bit instruction set for backward compatibility with 32-bit applications. The 2GHZ Opterons installed in this workstation run at a slower clock speed than other chips, but because the data path is doubled, performance is on par with the fastest Intel Xeon chips. Applications ported to 64-bit code ...