The Dell Precision Workstation 220
I recently obtained a wonderful toy in the form of a Dell Precision
Workstation 220 computer system. It was an eBay find, something that
I'm sure someone paid big bucks for once upon a time and probably cried
when it brought them $19.99 and shipping. But that's how it worked out.
I did not pay anywhere near the listed shipping price, in case you were wondering.
According to a handy May 2001 issue of Computer Shopper that I found
sunning...err, no, "darking" itself in my closet, the base Precision
220 with a single 933MHz processor would have set you back a cool
$1,399.
I cringe when I think what this one
cost. It shipped from the factory
in 2001 equipped with 768MB (!!!) RDRAM, two 40GB hard disks, a 12X
CD-RW drive and dual Pentium III processors clocked at 1GHz apiece. By
the time it darkened my door, one of the hard drives had become a 200GB
unit. (Yes, this thing really has 48-bit LBA support in the BIOS. Quite
amazing, really...especially when you consider that my much newer
Latitude D800 does not.)
The standard warranty was a three year next-business-day job, this
thing was ordered with a warranty that stipulated someone would come
around in four hours if it broke down.
It was a server for a number of terminals in a bank, according to something I found inscribed on one of the drive bay covers.
The thing flat out hauls. In almost every practical application (yes,
that's what I said--not "benchmark") this system will handily run rings around a single processor P4 even at much higher clock speeds. It chows through distributed.net like it was made to do so.
The only thing I have against it is
its use of RDRAM. I try as hard as I can not to support companies that
exist primarily to sue the pants off of other companies, and that's
something RAMBUS has proven especially talented at doing. I justify it
by trotting out one of my favorite sayings--"anything's worth twenty bucks!".
The RDRAM does appear to give the system a pretty good kick in terms of
performance. Memtest shows better performance numbers than most any
PC133-based system I can think of. It must be the unobtainium in the
RDRAM modules...
Someday soon I will take some
pictures of it inside and out. Unlike today's Dell computer, stamped
out by some contract manufacturer in the Pacific Rim, this thing is
a Dell designed and manufactured beast. Even (and this is quaint) the
plastic molding was done in Texas according to the company name and
address I found molded into the front panel near the date and material
codes. Internally, it is a lot like my OptiPlex GX170, but with more
bells and whistles and an AGP slot.
Bells and Whistles
It turns out that this highfalutin'
system has got some unique features, especially compared to much of the
rest of the Dell product universe. In particular, Dell's promotional literature
(PDF) points out that this system features "power and cooling system
monitoring". Many Dell systems do at least monitor fan speeds, but so
far as I know nobody has ever tapped the secret to how they're sensed
on many late model Dell systems outside of the laptops. The Precision
Workstation 220 actually has fan, temperature and voltage sensors, and
the always-wonderful SpeedFan
tool can find at least the temperature and tachometer readings.
(SpeedFan comments that it "needs support" for the Dallas-Maxim
Semiconductor IC that's used in the system for voltage monitoring.)
Unlike other systems, such as the OptiPlex 170L that I'm still
looking for floppy drive installation hardware for, Dell provides all
the hardware you need to put drives in this system less the screws
(which I have by the pound these days).
All in all, I think it's a pretty
cool system, and it is the first true dual processor computer I've ever
owned. For that reason alone it deserves special mention.
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2008 William R.
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