The Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 workstations are uniprocessor devices that use the family of UltraSPARC processors. They support high-performance CPU module (UltraSPARC-IIi) processing and high-performance graphics (Ultra 10 only).

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 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 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), a graphics port (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.

The Ultra 10 came in a mid-tower case with a 300, 333, 360, or 440-MHz UltraSPARC CPU. It doubled the supported RAM to a maximum of 1024 MB in four DIMM slots and added room for a second ATA hard disk, a fourth PCI card, and for an UPA graphics card such as the Creator, Creator3D or Elite3D.