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Management

SYS PowerHouse 3066D

31 Oct, 2003 By: Ron LaFon Cadalyst

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SYS Technology

4.5 stars out of 5
I was surprised when unpacking the SYS Technology system. I’m accustomed to receiving full-size towers from SYS, but this time it sent a compact midsized tower. The SYS PowerHouse 3066D is well built, and SYS clearly paid a lot of attention to detail with the system and its peripherals.

The SYS PowerHouse 3066D offers solid performance.

Though the swing-away door that covers the drive bays is not unusual, the cantilevered design that allows it to fold back flat against the side of the case is a nice touch. Another nice touch is that the SYS PowerHouse 3066D comes with both a DVD-ROM drive and a DVD-R/RW drive. The latter supports CD-R/RW recording while allowing direct DVD copying without first transferring the content to the hard drive. I awarded an overall bonus point for the quality of the software bundle included with the system and the overall quality of construction and integration.

The central components are dual 3.06GHz Intel Xeon microprocessors (DP version) socketed into an Intel motherboard supported by the E7505 chipset. As tested, the system had 2GB of PC2100 DDR SDRAM (DDR266) registered ECC memory, with 8GB possible. The AGP 8X slot on the motherboard was fitted with a PNY NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000 graphics card, which includes 128MB of on-board RAM. This is a speedy choice for a graphics card and avoids the additional cost of the FX 3000 card. As a result, the SYS PowerHouse 3066D workstation is priced at an attractive $4,895, even with the high-quality components and extras such as the additional DVD drive. This earned SYS Technologies an A+ for pricing. In all likelihood, the FX 3000 graphics card would produces higher speed ratings, but at a higher system price.