Sun Ultra 40 Workstation

The mighty Sun Ultra 40. I picked it up for cheap when I got my Sun Ultra 20. Contrary to its smaller sibling, the Sun Ultra 40 is a proper workstation featuring a 1000 watts power supply to feed the dual AMD Opteron CPUs. THe AMD Opteron CPU lineup was a equivalent of the Intel Xeon, they were intended for servers and large workstations. Alas, no Sparc processor in this machine, as this was reserved to the Ultra 45. I was just 5 units short :(. The Ultra 40, while being newer, was in direct line of competition with the Apple Powermac G5, but don’t think it was a close matchup. The Dual Opteron was more efficient, and more powerful than the most powerful offering from Apple.

My Sun Ultra 40

My Sun Ultra 40 has never been functional. When power is plugged into it, the fans starts spinning as loudly as they can, and… that’s it. They never go back to a reasonable volume, there’s no POST code, no display, nothing. We even tried hooking a PCI POST Card without any useful information. The only information reported is that there’s issue with the RAM. This machine takes DDR1-400 RAM sticks, which I have, but they have to be ECC memory, which I don’t have. I think I came across a post online mentioning that the computer cannot boot if non-ECC memory is installed. That would be the next step of investigation.

But… recently, the place where I store my less used computer got water intrusion. Not major, but still. Because the Sun Ultra 40 is a beast (both in term of size and weight), it was on the lower shelf of my storage. It might have touched the water, or not. I’m going to inspect the machine later on.

In the meanwhile, here’s picture of the beast itself, the Sun Ultra 40

And yes, the case is not in the best of shapes already.