These systems are notable for being the first in the Sun workstation line to introduce various commodity PC compatible hardware components such as ATA hard disks with CMD640 PCI EIDE controller and an ATI Rage PRO video chip.

The Ultra 5 came in a "pizzabox" style case with a 270, 333, 360, or 400 MHz UltraSPARC IIi CPU and supported a maximum of 512 MB Buffered EDO ECC RAM in four 50ns 168-pin DIMM slots. It included a single EIDE Hard Disk Drive of between 4 and 20 GB, a CD-ROM drive, three 32-bit 33 MHz PCI slots (two full-size, one short), PGX24 graphics (HD15), a parallel printer port (DB25), two serial ports (DB25 and DE9), an Ethernet port (10BASE-T/100BASE-TX) and headphone, line-in, line-out and microphone 3.5-mm jacks.

• Processor: 400MHz
• RAM: 256Mb
• Solaris 2.6.5/98