SYS DesignPro D16000

By Mark Clarkson

When I first unpacked the SYS DesignPro D16000 workstation from SYS Technology, I noticed something odd: The drives were all inset unevenly into the front bezel and the “blanks” that fill in the holes without drives were loose. Uh-oh. I popped open the case to see what was up.

The DesignPro’s floppy — yes, SYS Technology provides a floppy drive—and DVD drives are all held in place within the drive cage with sliding plastic locks, rather than screws. These locks had all come loose, allowing the drives to slide back into the case. I don’t know if the drives weren’t properly locked down to start with, or if the machine took an especially hard hit during shipping.

After reseating everything, one drive would still come loose with a firm push, despite my best efforts to lock it down. SYS offered to send out a new system just in case anything was damaged, but with the time constraints of this article in mind, I declined and soldiered on.

Besides, I’m always happy for an excuse to pop the hood and do some work inside the case. My system came in a black Gigabyte Poseidon midsize tower. It’s a nice looking case, solid and with just enough flair to keep it from looking like a boring box. There are some nice architectural touches on the front, and a sexy blue light on the exhaust fan. But when it comes to working inside the case, I’m less impressed.

To fix the loose “blanks” in the bezel, for example, I had to take the bezel off. And to do that, I had to remove both sides of the case. And to do that, I needed—gasp—a screwdriver. Tools? To open a case? I thought we were past all that. The Sun Ultra 40 sets my new gold standard for cases, but even my midline Dell  Dimension is easier to get in to and work inside of. At the very least,  give me screws with those big knurled heads.

Under the Hood

All of the DesignPro D16000’s components are top-notch, with nary a generic component in sight. The DesignPro D16000 is based on a Pentium D dual-core 3.6GHz CPU, mounted on a Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 motherboard with 2GB of OCZ DDR2 800MHz dual-channel RAM. The motherboard sports sexy copper heat-piping pulling heat away from your CPU, MOSFET modules, and motherboard bridges. Gigabyte refers to it as its Crazy Cool and Silent Pipe technology. The system was very quiet, although the glowing fan did develop a faint, ghostly whine.

SYS DesignPro D16000

Video is handled by a mid-range NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500 PCIEx16 card  from PNY with 256MB of GGR3 RAM. The FX 1500 has two dual-link DVI outputs as well as HD component out.

To get your data in and out, this system has about every connector known to man. Start with a 13-in-1 “media reader” with a USB port and slots for reading and writing all your favorite RAM cards (CF/MD,  SM/XD, MS/MSPRO, SD/ MMC). I’m not sure how that adds up to 13, but it includes every card I’ve ever used. Also up front are two more USB ports, a FireWire port, and headphone and microphone jacks. Around back you’ll find four more USB ports, another FireWire port,  8-channel high-definition audio jacks, an Ethernet 10/100/1000MBps port,  and—here’s something you don’t see every day—four external SATA ports with two external power connectors.

My system had two DVD drives: a 16xDVD+/-R/RW dual-layer burner with Lightscribe; and a 52x CD, 16x DVD-ROM.

Once inside, data is stored on twin Western Digital Caviar SATA II drives, striped together into a single, 500GB RAID 0 drive. (RAID 0 configures two physical drives as a single drive, splitting the data between them. RAID 0 provides no backup redundancy, but it greatly improves disk read/write times.)

Getting to Work

I loaded on some of my favorite software and gave the system a workout. Solid Edge V19 ran smoothly, although I could get it to hiccup when twirling assemblies of 50 parts or more with graphics options turned all the way up. If you work with lots of big assemblies, it probably behooves you to go with a beefier video card and more RAM.

Next, I fed the DesignPro one of my favorite system-grinders, loading a huge, 785,000-component IGES file into Rhino. This gives the RAM, the CPU, and the drive a good long thrash. (Note: Rhino isn’t multithreaded, so this only tests one processor core.) This kept the D16000 busy for 19 minutes. For comparison, this is five minutes longer than the Sun Ultra 40 with dual-core 2.4GHz Opteron 280s and 4GB of RAM. In fairness, though, the Ultra 40 lists for more than three times the price of my D16000. And the D16000 was better than twice as fast as my plain vanilla 2.8GHz P4 Dell with 1.5MB of RAM (46 minutes).

Next, I did some photorealistic rendering in LightWave 3D. This test shows off the D16000’s 3.6GHz processors a little better. The D16000 turned in render times of 106 seconds per frame, compared to about 125 seconds for the Ultra 40.

All in all, very solid performance for the money.

Quite Satisfactory Nontheless

I was happy to see that, while I got all the software I actually needed (e.g., Nero’s DVD authoring suite), the DesignPro 16000 did not come loaded down with 8 metric tons of composting animal effluent the way most consumer systems do. And it included an actual, honest-to-gosh operating system CD. Kudos! And SYS is also more than willing to sell you a system without that extra keyboard, mouse, and monitor that you don’t really need.

The SYS DesignPro 16000 workstation starts at $1,344. The system I reviewed goes for $2,457, sans monitor, keyboard and mouse. In spite of my couple of Uh-ohs, I found the DesignPro D16000 to be a good-looking unit built with lots of first-rate components that’ll give you your money’s worth with good performance.

Mark Clarkson has been writing about all manner of computer stuff for years. An expert in computer animation and graphics,  his newest book is Photoshop Elements by Example. Visit him on the Web at markclarkson.com or send your comments about this article through e-mail by clicking here. Please reference “SYS DesignPro Review, November 2006” in your message.

SYS DesignPro 16000 At a Glance

SYS Technology
City of Industry, CA

> Price: $2457, without monitor,  keyboard, and mouse
> CPU: 3.6GHz Pentium D dual-core
> Memory: 2GB of DDR2 800MHz dual-channel RAM
> Hard Disk: 2x 250GB Western Digital  SATA drives (RAID 0)
> Optical: 16x DVD+/-R/RW dual-layer burner with Lightscribe plus a52x CD, 16x DVD-ROM
> Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500 w/256MB GGR3 RAM

Companies Mentioned

Gigabyte Technology Co.,  Ltd.
City of Industry,CA

LightWave 3D
NewTek, Inc.
San Antonio, TX

Nero,  Inc.
Glendale, CA

Quadro FX 1500
NVIDIA Corp.
Santa Clara, CA

OCZ Technology, Inc.
Sunnyvale, CA

PNY Technologies
Parsippany, NJ

Rhino
McNeel & Associates
Seattle, WA

Solid Edge 19
UGS Corp.
Plano, TX