Details have emerged today, ahead of next week's Computex show in Taipei, of IWILL's successor to the ground-breaking
ZMAXdp, the world's first dual CPU small form factor (SFF) system. Aptly named the ZMAXd2, it seems that IWILL are seeing double again, as it not only again sports dual AMD Opteron processors, but will also support NVIDIA's SLI dual graphics cards!
Here is the motherboard which would have to be a contender for the Most-Power-per-Square-Inch Award. Dual 940-pin sockets dominate the vista, and there is now a dual Hyper Transport link between the two CPUs - IWILL claim a 20% performance boost over a single-HT system. And as if dual processors wasn't enough grunt, following AMD's recent announcement of
Dual Core Athlon 64s, the ZMAXd2 will support dual-core Opterons, meaning you will actually have FOUR processors in the one box!
Of course, the big news is the ditching of the previously shared AGP / PCI slot to make room for a pair of PCI-Express X16 slots ripe for SLI action; the system shown here features
two 6600GT cards, but next week we will certainly be grilling IWILL on whether the system can cope with a
pair of 6800GT cards.
This is all made possible by NVIDIA's nForce PRO MCP, which is essentially the
NF4 SLI chipset with added support for multi-processors.
SATA-II is now supported, meaning drives up to 3Gb/s; there are four SATA ports in the bottom right corner of the motherboard, though there is really only appears to be room for two hard drives. Maybe when the engineers were doubling just about everything else, they decided to double the number of SATA ports.
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