WORKSTATIONS HAVE always held a special place in my heart. I have a thing for dual-processor systems, RAID arrays, and gobs of memory, which probably goes a long way towards explaining my crush on workstation rigs. Workstations builds don't cut corners with low-end parts, and when it comes to performance, they don't pull any punches. For a power-hungry enthusiast, it doesn't get much better than that. Of course, workstations definitely aren't cheap. They're designed for big-boy playgrounds like CAD, scientific computing, and content creation environments. There, the price premium associated with workstation platforms is justified by the improved performance and reliability that they offer.

Today, we'll be getting our workstation groove on with Appro's Scorpion WH300, a fearsome beast built around AMD's Opteron platform. With 4GB of memory, a striped Serial ATA RAID array, and a Quadro 980 XGL graphics card, the Scorpion is dressed to the nines for workstation loads. The system we'll be looking at is also packed with a couple of Opteron 246 processors running at an even 2.0GHz.

Is Appro's Scorpion WH300 a lust-worthy Opteron workstation? Read on to find out.