Right out of the box, Polywell's PolyStation7525SLI falls a little short of its name due to its lone NVIDIA QuadroFX 4400. NVIDIA tells us it will probably release drivers that support Quadro SLI before you read this, but as we went to press, workstations still use one card. That said, the 512MB workstation card is no slouch and can hold its own until the reinforcement arrives. Weirdly enough, Polywell chose a 460W Fortron PSU. NVIDIA's David Higham says that dual-Quadro systems will require PSUs in the 650 to 750W range.

Polywell mixed fast with fast by dropping a striped array of 10,000rpm hard drives into the top drive cage, but it didn't follow through with storage, the other half of a good hard drive package. The two 74GB drives offer more than enough to handle an array of programs but not enough to store a bunch of video-editing projects and finished products. The drive shortage isn't a problem by itself, but the motherboard doesn't have any extra SATA ports, which means you'll need to buy an add-on card if you want to add more SATA drives. Home offices that have servers are fewer than those that don't, so we're disappointed the system doesn't have more hard drives or at least better upgradeability in this area.

Home-office gurus would probably prefer the souped-up version of the motherboard. The Poly 7525SLI PCIe is a Supermicro Super X6DAI-G, a streamlined version of the Super X6DAT-G. The latter offers four more SATA ports than the former, thanks to a Marvell controller near the southbridge. Polywell doesn't offer the X6DAT-G as an option. The system's board houses two 3.6GHz Intel Xeons and 2GB of ECC memory, which fill four of the board's eight slots.

Don't plan on adding a media reader unless you're willing to use the PolyStation's remaining 5.25-inch bay. The system has a floppy drive, but you can't swap it with a reader because of the floppy-only external 3.5-inch bay. The other 5.25-inch bays house a 16X Sony DW-D22A DVD+RW (2.4X DL) and a 52X Sony CRX320E CD-RW, which ought to cover your burning needs. The CD-RW seems overkill, though, as it offers CD burn and read speeds the DW-22A can't match. (The DW-D22A offers 48X.)

Of these systems the PolyStation most closely resembles an office workstation. The front panel sports several status lights and two USB 2.0 ports, but it doesn't offer FireWire ports. (Neither does the mobo.) And watch out for the PolyStation's two large, plastic feet, which might scratch up vulnerable surfaces. The chassis is spacious, supporting up to eight hard drives, but Polywell didn't hide the cables. The interior certainly isn't messy, however.

Polywell's beast performed well in our tests, posting an impressive 266 in SYS-mark 2004, encoding Dr.DivX in 8:18, and offering solid SPECviewperf numbers. We were a little surprised to see it break five minutes when compressing our 500MB test folder, but 5:15 isn't unreasonable.

The PolyStation is a workhorse, but it isn't upgrade-ready out of the box. If you don't mind swapping out the PSU and adding a SATA controller card, you'll get along fine with this rig, but that's a big "if."

by Joshua Gulick

PolyStation 7525SLI
$5,665
Polywell
(800) 999-1278
(650) 583-7222
www.polywell.com