That's not what it says. "I grabbed a spare 60GB OCZ Vertex 3 I had laying around" Sounds like a reasonable test to see if there is a storage bottleneck. Whatever you thought should have happened with multiple SSD's sounds like a waste of money anyway.
Exactly. He mentioned the 60GB SSD had little to no impact on anything but the PCMARK Suite which is disk-intensive, so no need to test with a faster/larger SSD.
However, in defense of Lenovo (and HP,) Dell has been plagued with capacitor quality problems for nearly a decade from the top-down. I've had so many PERC controllers and workstation/server motherboards fail in one way or another, always traced down to a bad $1.00 capacitor.
Have never had this happen with an HP or Lenovo workstation.
When the "bad cap scandal" began un 2001, HP had completely purged its supply by 2004, as did Lenovo in 2005. Dell NEVER required its primary suppliers (Foxconn mostly) purge their supplies and refresh with genuine Japanese (or at least quality Taiwanese) caps from Rubycon, Sanyo, Panasonic, and Chemicon. The problem is Chemicon (and Nichicon) have so many counterfeits that it's risky to stock them. Case in point, there are lots of reports of Nichicon caps actually being Nichilon (knockoff name) caps from China.
I replaced a SC440 motherboard in a server a few weeks ago manufactured in 2007 that had a number of bulging CapXon caps around the MOSFETs. A PERC 6ir controller with a bad KZG cap preventing array detection, manufactured in 2008. It cost $1 to replace the cap with a genuine Panasonic equal, but it cost the client an entire day without a server and $300 for my services (beats ordering a new $400 card from Dell with another faulty cap.
HP isn't completely clear, though. I find numerous low quality OST or underrated caps in their printers and low-end desktops. Seriously, the HP PhotoSmart C6280/C7280 (only difference is a duplexer) and various other model printer based on the same design from 2007-2008 were built using good Panasonic caps that were rated at 10v and installed into a 12v circuit. It's amazing many of these printers run for years before having carriage malfunctions or dropping wifi connections. Again, $4 in caps fixes an otherwise good multi-hundred dollar printer, especially worth it if you've stocked up on ink for them.
Many Samsung LCD's from 2006-2007 have known power capacitor problems preventing them from powering on. The 35v 1000uf is used where a 50v 1000uf would have been more appropriate, although the real issue was it being a non-FM cap so it electrical noise caused them to fail prematurely. A huge class-action lawsuit covered HDTV's, but people with LCD monitors were left out to dry.
As well as Dell's are designed, their quality issues are reflected in their bottom-dollar prices. I know mobo's use solid poly caps in vital areas now, but dude, it's still a Dell.
Interesting. So you are better of with a D30. I have personally used D20 for the past few years and never had any problems with hardware. I am looking for a new D30 machine to upgrade to. Lenovo website has ridiculous prices which I will never pay. I am shopping around to see where I can get the best deal. I saw a few deals on eBay and CDW. Hopefully they have a sale soon. I will post a review once I get the machine hopefully soon.
i know anand has said a lot about the life expectancy of SSDs and how 840 with its TLC should last 7 years with light use (which is about 10G write data per day). However, it is absolutely importantly to know your HDD has a lot of activities going on in the background even with your system is idle.
look no further than open your windows resource manager and check the disk use. at this very moment, i have 3 pdf open, outlook open, 2 firefox tab open, one IE open, and anti virus. i have absolutely nothing else turned on and my disk is seeing 50 KB/S disk write at the lowest. even at the lowest level, i am expected to write 4G of data everyday when my computer is idle.
i do believe anand's SSD life expectancy analysis is somewhat flawed because it failed to include necessary disk writes as part of OS. while 10G write data per day seem to be a large number, it actually isn't. when i start doing video encoding, i can easily break the 10G data cap in at little as few minutes. check it your yourself.
therefore, if my server is to be expected seeing a lot of data processing and rendering, i can say for a fact that i would be very concerned using anything but SLC. if i were to provide 3 or 5 year warranty for my system, i would not use SSD.
Seems to be configured much like an updated 2013 Mac Pro. Whenever that machine gets released by Apple, maybe a 4-way comparison between similarly configured HP, Dell, Lenovo & Apple Mac Pro workstation-class machines could be reviewed?
yes the real competitor to this in the media space is the Mac Pro.
We shall see next year when Apple updates the design for their professional workstations, how these machines stack up against them.
Really the Mac Pro is king of media.. you can pretty much run any Windows/Linux software via virtualization, while having access to the exclusive Apple software like Final Cut Pro X.
Joke's on you, FCPX landed with a thud. Premiere CS5 onward even handle old FCP7 projects better than FCPX does.
Apple is a virtual non-starter in the enterprise desktop market, and the fact that it's taking them so long to refresh the Mac Pro should be evidence enough of that.
These aren't desktop machines, in case you haven't noticed. Apple does very well in the workstation market there Mac Pro's are aimed at. It's Apple that has been distracted these past two years. Hopefully that will change next year.
Apple's enterprise sales for Mac's rose 56% last year, compared to an 8% drop in Windows sales to that space. Don't count them out.
FCPX is better than your limited knowledge of it suggests, and not that many editors have run to Adobe. Apple has been adding the features that hadn't made it into the first release. It took the original FCP over a year to gain all the pro features needed as well. Those using the older version are mostly waiting for Apple to complete these updates.
56% from what ? When your enterprise sales are invisible 56% means nothing. Similarly to WP yoy increase of 145%, more so than ios/android. Also you're talking Windows in general, not talking about a single manufacturer, any of which dwarf Apple's enterprise presence. Typical FUD from AI.
The Mac Pro, besides being horrifically overpriced as Apple's only normal desktop, is running hardware TWO generations out of date. I like the hardware design, being able to run OS X on it's great too, but...a few months late is a problem. 2 years late is abandonment.
Actually... Quite a lot of editors switched to Premiere CS6 from FCP7. FCP X is a complete failure. I got our edithouse switched to Premiere quite early and now I'm getting questions from a lot of posthouses about the switch.
FCPX is ok for fun little projects and for youtube. For a professional environment (where sharing projects is quite common) it is not ok. Atleast not yet.
Yeah, dem MacPros will be sumptin. I head a rumor that it will be so powerful to warp the Reality Distortion Field into itself. Creating a singularity, singling out and sucking in all happy faced AppleFanBoys wherever they may exisit.
It doesn't take a fanboy to see that Apple offers, since 2003, clean and easy to access workstation, while Lenovo tries to sell a $10k mess of a thing.
Apple needn't rethink its Mac Pro case design just offer up-to-date components.
I would expect at least 32GB of RAM, preferably 64GB. There are other uses for a machine like that, but some compilers can use as much as 1.5GB per thread. With 16GB of RAM, you wouldn't even be able to use half the threads without hitting the swap file.
Got a z820 as well a few months ago, but IT's standard layout is 8x2 GB as well. ordererd 4x8GB to add - but the board doesn't support that as 48GB combination, so only running 32gigs.
Need moar memory. Colleague is eyeing ordering another 32 to at least get the machine to be slightly more usable..
As far as i know mixed RAM sizes should be possible; have you had a look at the Service manual for the Z820? There´s a hint in what order the Dimms should be placed. -> heres a link: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/C...
My last job I was running a Dell T7500. The more ram, the better. I didn't need as much processing power, but needed memory. Was using it for system integration work, so I was running multiple VMs. 16 gig of ram and I was running out all the time. Having to pause/shutdown a VM to fire up another one.
If you want to really push the build quality and design, don't compare a 2 socket WS with 1 socket systems. You need to compare this system with a HP z620 and a Dell T5600.
If you really want to bring the added value over these way overprised CPU you need to find very specific applications to do so... for 99% they are never needed besides EGO. These days most will run just fine with a 1 socket WS with all the cpu power existing today.
Umm, no. They're basically more overpriced than Lenovo for essentially the same hardware. Why do you think it would be significantly faster?
When I'm shelling out that much money for a workstation I stick with HP, Lenovo, or Dell. I've gone with smaller vendors before and their support level just isn't there. Dell workstation support is actually pretty good, as opposed to their crappy consumer support.
Thanks for the review of another enterprise workstation. I really appreciate keeping up with what this market to has. Having worked a previous company that was in bed with HP it is nice to see what the other big guys are up to.
I totally agree about the wiring nightmare. I can give this an F- for wiring, especially at this price point! I would expect, yes expect, a very clean system inside to maintain airflow, remove extra surface area for dust to collect, and to make system maintenance/hardware upgrades painless. The inside of this case looks like a system that someone just learning how to assemble PCs for the first time.
A government entity I recently worked with had procured this same chassis with a slightly different configuration and I was confused at the lack of redundancy within the storage tier of the solution. A single 150GB WD Raptor drove the solution. The lack of RAID 1 really surprised me considering the reduction in potential downtime this simple addition could make. There are clearly many single points of failure within this system, I'm not saying this machine needs dual PSUs. etc, but a little more value in the storage tier would make this compute crunch look that much more like a contender.
Last thought, 2GB ECC modules are direct cheap and moving to a higher density 4GB module seems like a no brainer to hit the entry mark of 16GB of RAM. I really hate it when OEMs take this route with a brand new machine. It just screams cheap.
There is a performance hit for going RAID 1 unless you have a really good hardware solution. You're generally better off with a separate hardware RAID solution for your data and keep the RAPTOR or SSD as a single drive. Especially with an SSD, failure is very unusual. Just keeping weekly backups of the system is sufficient for me. If you really can't tolerate downtime, you're better off cloning the drive periodically than going RAID1. RAID1 is to prevent data loss, not prevent downtime. You're going to have downtime while you rebuild the array anyway.
I do all my compute on an SSD and then have an external SAS storage box attached to a good hardware RAID controller in RAID10 to store all my input/output files.
"RAID1 is to prevent data loss, not prevent downtime. You're going to have downtime while you rebuild the array anyway."
For someone using such awesome hardware, I don't know how you got this exactly backwards. RAID1 is not going to save you from deleting the wrong directory or mirroring OS corruption. It *WILL* allow the system to keep running when one of the drives fails, and even terrible software RAID won't force downtime while you rebuild the array, where did you get that notion from?
With respect, I didn't get anything backwards. The comment about deleting a file is silly and irrelevant. No RAID mode will prevent human error.
RAID1 prevents data loss from a single drive failure. That is what it is for. So for me, from experience, my compute performance is degraded 5x during a RAID rebuild.
So I switched to having a cloned drive, which will get me back to full performance very quickly. I'll lose the last compute job I was working on, but that is usually not a big deal. I stand by my recommendation.
I have a thinkserver ts130 at home, and I have to agree that the cabling is less stellar than my dell poweredge servers in the office, but lenovo has much superior quality caps than the dells.
I am constantly getting service requests to swap out motherboards on the dells, due to one small component getting fried. I know its not the power, because we have line conditioners smoothing out the voltage.
If you want less hassles in life, buy lenovo servers and workstations.
I am consistently amazed at the Lenovo product designers who can take cutting edge hardware and then make it look like it was manufactured 15 years ago. They should market it as an anti-theft feature.
HAHA! I agree 100%! Recently I bought a Lenovo D30 from eBAY and it looks absolutely the same as the D20. You know what the D20 and D30 look very similar, the casing might even be the same thing. I guess some companies like to KEEP IT SIMPLE. I like that better then making it look like a creation from Mars. It is well built and I don't feel like I will break anything if I change things out. Even If I do they have an awesome warranty.
Really... 16. I don't know about you, workstation task i'm interested in are more RAM intensive than processor intensive. At 10 grand i'd expect 128 gb at the least.
$150 for a 2 GB registered ECC DIMM $300 for a 4 GB registered ECC DIMM $650 for an 8 GB registered ECC DIMM $1350 for a 16 GB registered ECC DIMM
So a 128GB version of this system would cost slightly over 20 grand, with more than half the cost going to the memory.
That price seems excessive to me, as well. A similar system from AVA Direct, with 128GB of memory, will cost under 10 grand. That includes a 3 year on site warranty (contracted out to Intel).
I just happen to look at this review so I am in no way knowledgeable in the server department but am I missing something, $10800??? I just priced all the stuff at $6,850 at new egg. So is the extra 4k for 3 years of support? Is there some special reason it has a markup like that?
Well, you can usually price something significantly lower by buying the components. These days it is harder with lower end stuff but the more high end the product the higher the margins are.
Understand the target market for these workstations. They're for people who are doing computational modeling, professional 3D rendering, etc. They are paying for stability, support, etc.
The author points out that Dell is getting very aggressive with price with much lower margins. We use Lenovo workstations because that is who our IS has a deal with, but we don't pay retail. We would probably get this system for $7k to $8k.
The worst part of it is Lenovo's markups on the CPUs are VERY high... Thousands of dollars more than purchasing 2 CPUs from Newegg. for the UPGRADE to the faster CPUs.
In other words, I could buy the base system from Lenovo, and buy 2 faster CPUs from Newegg, and save thousands of dollars. Perhaps the same holds true for RAM and disks.
That is really not a clever thing to do, then you can just as well build the whole system yourself, because whenever you silk call the manufacturer for support they definitely will start the conversation with " start by removing all of those parts you bought from someone else, reinstall the whole thing, and then you call us back. Okay?" :-)
Honestly that is a rip off. If you shop around on sites like e@GAy etc..you will find a good deal. Why pay retail? I have seen systems for half the price Lenovo.com is selling them for. If you search for D30 you will see numerous systems, check it out if you are interested. And sometimes you can call the sellers and bargain. As long as they make some money they will sell it and it will be 30-50% off lenovo's website. I recently got a D30 and price was 50% cheaper then Lenovo's website. Same warranty and hardware on lenovo's website. The key is using your intelligence and shopping around. Generally regarding the warranty they will tell you to take off everything that didn't come with the system from the factory.
Honestly that is a rip off. If you shop around on sites like e@GAy etc..you will find a good deal. Why pay retail? I have seen systems for half the price Lenovo.com is selling them for. If you search for D30 you will see numerous systems, check it out if you are interested. And sometimes you can call the sellers and bargain. As long as they make some money they will sell it and it will be 30-50% off lenovo's website. I recently got a D30 and price was 50% cheaper then Lenovo's website. Same warranty and hardware on lenovo's website. The key is using your intelligence and shopping around.
The system tested today is a standalone workstation and not a server to be used in a cluster or a supercomputer Therefore,it is less important to have user-serviceable power supply,as it is likely that this PSU will last for a long time for a single unit It has 2 octocore processors,with double the processing power of the similar Dell workstation/server Adn the price is only 50% higher ,so it is a good workstation for most people
In many cases it leaves the results given here in the dust (eg. 83.31 for LW, 16.63 for ProE). The reason is some of the tests are single threaded on the CPU side or so lightly threaded that a higher clock makes a huge difference. If you want to run ProE, then yes have a good GPU, but shove it in a consumer machine with a single good oc'd 4-core or 6-core i7 and it'll run much quicker than one of these OEM workstations. YMMV for other apps/tasks, but for Viewperf it's interesting how oodles of cores at a lower clock so often loses to just one 4-core i7 at a high clock.
Shop around on eBay, Google, Amazon for the best deals. Never pay retail !!! I bought a Brand New System on eBay for 50% off lenovo.com's website. Same system at Lenovo.com was close to $15,000 without taxes and fees. I bought it for $4200 dual xeon 2650, 5 SSD Drives (LENOVO Drives) and 64GB Factory ECC 1600mhz Memory and mid-range Quadro. So please don't get ripped off by paying factory pricing. Search on Google, Amazon, Ebay for the best deals.
I haven't used a real workstation class PC since the Dell I had in 2000 (remember rdram?), but it was truly awesome, internal design alone made it worth the money. I've had a dozen PC's but that is the one I remember most. Man was it stable and fast. This article made me nostalgic for it, so thanks.
In the future, it would be nice to see how these multi thousand dollar workstations compare to a single CPU overclocked enthusiast box with a high end video card.
An i5 3570k or 3700k at 4.6+ and a geforce 670 or 680 just so we can get some perspective. Pretty sure that it would be middle of the pack and at 10% of the cost.
I see that you have a puget in there with the i5 2500k, but it has the on chip video. That's a pretty worthless addition to the charts when we're talking about high end graphics workstation performance.
Modern games have little to do with cores...very few of them will care for the 8-threads a 2600K/3770K has to offer over a 2500K/3570K. In case some should (happens in some cases and extreme resolutions, Tri-Quad SLI and the works), a 3930K would beat most Xeons (1P, 2P, 10P - w/e).
Single threaded performance is still very important in most fields. CAD, CG and video editing included. Again, fast i7s (and sometimes fast i5s) will beat Xeons due to faster clocks. Add O/C to make multithreaded performance of a s2011 hex-i7 unrivaled even by mid-range 2P systems.
16GB of RAM and 60GB SSDs are a joke - period. So are the monies asked to upgrade them (over market prices) when building to order such workstations by Lenovo, Dell, HP etc.
Ppl that believe that 2P is a limiting factor, think again: which Windows OS distribution you think allows you utilize more than 2P systems? Def. not Win 7 64bit ;-)
I saw one for sale on eBay. Which has 4 X Lenovo SSD Drives and 2TB. Has 64GB of memory. I might just give an offer to that guy see how much he takes. I used the D20 and I really like these machines. They are not pretty like the dells but they are rock solid.
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philipma1957 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
please all this money and you tested with 2x 60gb ssd's why not test with 2x 256gb samsung 830's ssd's.Zink - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
That's not what it says."I grabbed a spare 60GB OCZ Vertex 3 I had laying around"
Sounds like a reasonable test to see if there is a storage bottleneck. Whatever you thought should have happened with multiple SSD's sounds like a waste of money anyway.
Samus - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Exactly. He mentioned the 60GB SSD had little to no impact on anything but the PCMARK Suite which is disk-intensive, so no need to test with a faster/larger SSD.However, in defense of Lenovo (and HP,) Dell has been plagued with capacitor quality problems for nearly a decade from the top-down. I've had so many PERC controllers and workstation/server motherboards fail in one way or another, always traced down to a bad $1.00 capacitor.
Have never had this happen with an HP or Lenovo workstation.
When the "bad cap scandal" began un 2001, HP had completely purged its supply by 2004, as did Lenovo in 2005. Dell NEVER required its primary suppliers (Foxconn mostly) purge their supplies and refresh with genuine Japanese (or at least quality Taiwanese) caps from Rubycon, Sanyo, Panasonic, and Chemicon. The problem is Chemicon (and Nichicon) have so many counterfeits that it's risky to stock them. Case in point, there are lots of reports of Nichicon caps actually being Nichilon (knockoff name) caps from China.
I replaced a SC440 motherboard in a server a few weeks ago manufactured in 2007 that had a number of bulging CapXon caps around the MOSFETs. A PERC 6ir controller with a bad KZG cap preventing array detection, manufactured in 2008. It cost $1 to replace the cap with a genuine Panasonic equal, but it cost the client an entire day without a server and $300 for my services (beats ordering a new $400 card from Dell with another faulty cap.
HP isn't completely clear, though. I find numerous low quality OST or underrated caps in their printers and low-end desktops. Seriously, the HP PhotoSmart C6280/C7280 (only difference is a duplexer) and various other model printer based on the same design from 2007-2008 were built using good Panasonic caps that were rated at 10v and installed into a 12v circuit. It's amazing many of these printers run for years before having carriage malfunctions or dropping wifi connections. Again, $4 in caps fixes an otherwise good multi-hundred dollar printer, especially worth it if you've stocked up on ink for them.
Many Samsung LCD's from 2006-2007 have known power capacitor problems preventing them from powering on. The 35v 1000uf is used where a 50v 1000uf would have been more appropriate, although the real issue was it being a non-FM cap so it electrical noise caused them to fail prematurely. A huge class-action lawsuit covered HDTV's, but people with LCD monitors were left out to dry.
As well as Dell's are designed, their quality issues are reflected in their bottom-dollar prices. I know mobo's use solid poly caps in vital areas now, but dude, it's still a Dell.
Haribol - Tuesday, November 20, 2012 - link
Interesting. So you are better of with a D30. I have personally used D20 for the past few years and never had any problems with hardware. I am looking for a new D30 machine to upgrade to. Lenovo website has ridiculous prices which I will never pay. I am shopping around to see where I can get the best deal. I saw a few deals on eBay and CDW. Hopefully they have a sale soon. I will post a review once I get the machine hopefully soon.seanleeforever - Monday, November 19, 2012 - link
i know anand has said a lot about the life expectancy of SSDs and how 840 with its TLC should last 7 years with light use (which is about 10G write data per day). However, it is absolutely importantly to know your HDD has a lot of activities going on in the background even with your system is idle.look no further than open your windows resource manager and check the disk use.
at this very moment, i have 3 pdf open, outlook open, 2 firefox tab open, one IE open, and anti virus. i have absolutely nothing else turned on and my disk is seeing 50 KB/S disk write at the lowest. even at the lowest level, i am expected to write 4G of data everyday when my computer is idle.
i do believe anand's SSD life expectancy analysis is somewhat flawed because it failed to include necessary disk writes as part of OS. while 10G write data per day seem to be a large number, it actually isn't. when i start doing video encoding, i can easily break the 10G data cap in at little as few minutes. check it your yourself.
therefore, if my server is to be expected seeing a lot of data processing and rendering, i can say for a fact that i would be very concerned using anything but SLC. if i were to provide 3 or 5 year warranty for my system, i would not use SSD.
vailr - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Seems to be configured much like an updated 2013 Mac Pro.Whenever that machine gets released by Apple, maybe a 4-way comparison between similarly configured HP, Dell, Lenovo & Apple Mac Pro workstation-class machines could be reviewed?
afkrotch - Wednesday, November 21, 2012 - link
Except that no one cares about the Mac Pro. People buying these workstations, aren't buying Apple ones.vFunct - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
yes the real competitor to this in the media space is the Mac Pro.We shall see next year when Apple updates the design for their professional workstations, how these machines stack up against them.
Really the Mac Pro is king of media.. you can pretty much run any Windows/Linux software via virtualization, while having access to the exclusive Apple software like Final Cut Pro X.
Dustin Sklavos - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Joke's on you, FCPX landed with a thud. Premiere CS5 onward even handle old FCP7 projects better than FCPX does.Apple is a virtual non-starter in the enterprise desktop market, and the fact that it's taking them so long to refresh the Mac Pro should be evidence enough of that.
melgross - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
These aren't desktop machines, in case you haven't noticed. Apple does very well in the workstation market there Mac Pro's are aimed at. It's Apple that has been distracted these past two years. Hopefully that will change next year.Apple's enterprise sales for Mac's rose 56% last year, compared to an 8% drop in Windows sales to that space. Don't count them out.
FCPX is better than your limited knowledge of it suggests, and not that many editors have run to Adobe. Apple has been adding the features that hadn't made it into the first release. It took the original FCP over a year to gain all the pro features needed as well. Those using the older version are mostly waiting for Apple to complete these updates.
ananduser - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
56% from what ? When your enterprise sales are invisible 56% means nothing. Similarly to WP yoy increase of 145%, more so than ios/android. Also you're talking Windows in general, not talking about a single manufacturer, any of which dwarf Apple's enterprise presence. Typical FUD from AI.Wolfpup - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
The Mac Pro, besides being horrifically overpriced as Apple's only normal desktop, is running hardware TWO generations out of date. I like the hardware design, being able to run OS X on it's great too, but...a few months late is a problem. 2 years late is abandonment.hmcindie - Saturday, November 17, 2012 - link
Actually... Quite a lot of editors switched to Premiere CS6 from FCP7. FCP X is a complete failure. I got our edithouse switched to Premiere quite early and now I'm getting questions from a lot of posthouses about the switch.Dug - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
FCPX has been improved tremendously and is now where it should have been when it launched. The same with CS6.The difference is the final product and FCPX has better filters, compression, and exporting. It is essentially 3x-5x times faster than CS6.
nowendoc - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
>It is essentially 3x-5x times faster than CS6.Is that CS6 running with GPU acceleration?
hmcindie - Saturday, November 17, 2012 - link
FCPX is ok for fun little projects and for youtube. For a professional environment (where sharing projects is quite common) it is not ok. Atleast not yet.centhar - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Yeah, dem MacPros will be sumptin. I head a rumor that it will be so powerful to warp the Reality Distortion Field into itself. Creating a singularity, singling out and sucking in all happy faced AppleFanBoys wherever they may exisit.Torrijos - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
It doesn't take a fanboy to see that Apple offers, since 2003, clean and easy to access workstation, while Lenovo tries to sell a $10k mess of a thing.Apple needn't rethink its Mac Pro case design just offer up-to-date components.
vFunct - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
I could go for rack-mount Mac Pros.theduckofdeath - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
Is this discussion for real? :-)No one in their right mind would go for a Mac pro, definitely not of they were considering track mounted workstations. Retro isn't selling in IT.
theduckofdeath - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
*rack mountedafkrotch - Wednesday, November 21, 2012 - link
It doesn't take a fanboy to see that Apple simply updates too slowly and that just isn't going to be an option where time is money.melgross - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Very amusing. You must do standup.twtech - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
I would expect at least 32GB of RAM, preferably 64GB. There are other uses for a machine like that, but some compilers can use as much as 1.5GB per thread. With 16GB of RAM, you wouldn't even be able to use half the threads without hitting the swap file.Joschka77 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Thats exactly what i was thinking, too.Got an HP Z 820 with two E5 2680 and 128GB of RAM next to me...
This thing is a beast...
Rick83 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Got a z820 as well a few months ago, but IT's standard layout is 8x2 GB as well.ordererd 4x8GB to add - but the board doesn't support that as 48GB combination, so only running 32gigs.
Need moar memory.
Colleague is eyeing ordering another 32 to at least get the machine to be slightly more usable..
Joschka77 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
As far as i know mixed RAM sizes should be possible; have you had a look at the Service manual for the Z820? There´s a hint in what order the Dimms should be placed. ->heres a link:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/C...
afkrotch - Wednesday, November 21, 2012 - link
My last job I was running a Dell T7500. The more ram, the better. I didn't need as much processing power, but needed memory. Was using it for system integration work, so I was running multiple VMs. 16 gig of ram and I was running out all the time. Having to pause/shutdown a VM to fire up another one.duploxxx - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
If you want to really push the build quality and design, don't compare a 2 socket WS with 1 socket systems.You need to compare this system with a HP z620 and a Dell T5600.
If you really want to bring the added value over these way overprised CPU you need to find very specific applications to do so... for 99% they are never needed besides EGO. These days most will run just fine with a 1 socket WS with all the cpu power existing today.
extide - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
For the people who buy these systems, even dual E5-2687W's is still too slow.colonelciller - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Let's have a review of a true powerhouse from BOXXi have a feeling that a high end workstation from BOXXwould put other big name manufacturers to shame
http://www.boxxtech.com/
just4U - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
They'd have to send in a review sample..theduckofdeath - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
" That's not a knife. This is a knife."http://www.elnexus.com/products.aspx?line_id=15689
kkwst2 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Umm, no. They're basically more overpriced than Lenovo for essentially the same hardware. Why do you think it would be significantly faster?When I'm shelling out that much money for a workstation I stick with HP, Lenovo, or Dell. I've gone with smaller vendors before and their support level just isn't there. Dell workstation support is actually pretty good, as opposed to their crappy consumer support.
afkrotch - Wednesday, November 21, 2012 - link
Dell's Enterprise Gold Support is fabulouscreed3020 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Thanks for the review of another enterprise workstation. I really appreciate keeping up with what this market to has. Having worked a previous company that was in bed with HP it is nice to see what the other big guys are up to.I totally agree about the wiring nightmare. I can give this an F- for wiring, especially at this price point! I would expect, yes expect, a very clean system inside to maintain airflow, remove extra surface area for dust to collect, and to make system maintenance/hardware upgrades painless. The inside of this case looks like a system that someone just learning how to assemble PCs for the first time.
A government entity I recently worked with had procured this same chassis with a slightly different configuration and I was confused at the lack of redundancy within the storage tier of the solution. A single 150GB WD Raptor drove the solution. The lack of RAID 1 really surprised me considering the reduction in potential downtime this simple addition could make. There are clearly many single points of failure within this system, I'm not saying this machine needs dual PSUs. etc, but a little more value in the storage tier would make this compute crunch look that much more like a contender.
Last thought, 2GB ECC modules are direct cheap and moving to a higher density 4GB module seems like a no brainer to hit the entry mark of 16GB of RAM. I really hate it when OEMs take this route with a brand new machine. It just screams cheap.
kkwst2 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
There is a performance hit for going RAID 1 unless you have a really good hardware solution. You're generally better off with a separate hardware RAID solution for your data and keep the RAPTOR or SSD as a single drive. Especially with an SSD, failure is very unusual. Just keeping weekly backups of the system is sufficient for me. If you really can't tolerate downtime, you're better off cloning the drive periodically than going RAID1. RAID1 is to prevent data loss, not prevent downtime. You're going to have downtime while you rebuild the array anyway.I do all my compute on an SSD and then have an external SAS storage box attached to a good hardware RAID controller in RAID10 to store all my input/output files.
Taft12 - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
"RAID1 is to prevent data loss, not prevent downtime. You're going to have downtime while you rebuild the array anyway."For someone using such awesome hardware, I don't know how you got this exactly backwards. RAID1 is not going to save you from deleting the wrong directory or mirroring OS corruption. It *WILL* allow the system to keep running when one of the drives fails, and even terrible software RAID won't force downtime while you rebuild the array, where did you get that notion from?
kkwst2 - Sunday, November 18, 2012 - link
With respect, I didn't get anything backwards. The comment about deleting a file is silly and irrelevant. No RAID mode will prevent human error.RAID1 prevents data loss from a single drive failure. That is what it is for. So for me, from experience, my compute performance is degraded 5x during a RAID rebuild.
So I switched to having a cloned drive, which will get me back to full performance very quickly. I'll lose the last compute job I was working on, but that is usually not a big deal. I stand by my recommendation.
edlee - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
I have a thinkserver ts130 at home, and I have to agree that the cabling is less stellar than my dell poweredge servers in the office, but lenovo has much superior quality caps than the dells.I am constantly getting service requests to swap out motherboards on the dells, due to one small component getting fried. I know its not the power, because we have line conditioners smoothing out the voltage.
If you want less hassles in life, buy lenovo servers and workstations.
Gunbuster - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
I am consistently amazed at the Lenovo product designers who can take cutting edge hardware and then make it look like it was manufactured 15 years ago. They should market it as an anti-theft feature.Haribol - Monday, November 26, 2012 - link
HAHA! I agree 100%! Recently I bought a Lenovo D30 from eBAY and it looks absolutely the same as the D20. You know what the D20 and D30 look very similar, the casing might even be the same thing. I guess some companies like to KEEP IT SIMPLE. I like that better then making it look like a creation from Mars. It is well built and I don't feel like I will break anything if I change things out. Even If I do they have an awesome warranty.Wolfpup - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Oh man, 16 physical CPUs in one system...I sooooo want one of these for Folding. Throw in some extra Geforce GTX 680s too! :-Dtanishalfelven - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Really... 16. I don't know about you, workstation task i'm interested in are more RAM intensive than processor intensive. At 10 grand i'd expect 128 gb at the least.KAlmquist - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
Lenova's price list is:$150 for a 2 GB registered ECC DIMM
$300 for a 4 GB registered ECC DIMM
$650 for an 8 GB registered ECC DIMM
$1350 for a 16 GB registered ECC DIMM
So a 128GB version of this system would cost slightly over 20 grand, with more than half the cost going to the memory.
That price seems excessive to me, as well. A similar system from AVA Direct, with 128GB of memory, will cost under 10 grand. That includes a 3 year on site warranty (contracted out to Intel).
Haribol - Monday, November 26, 2012 - link
Never pay retail. Shop around on sites like eBay, Google etc for best deals!hyperchild - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
I just happen to look at this review so I am in no way knowledgeable in the server department but am I missing something, $10800??? I just priced all the stuff at $6,850 at new egg. So is the extra 4k for 3 years of support? Is there some special reason it has a markup like that?kkwst2 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Well, you can usually price something significantly lower by buying the components. These days it is harder with lower end stuff but the more high end the product the higher the margins are.Understand the target market for these workstations. They're for people who are doing computational modeling, professional 3D rendering, etc. They are paying for stability, support, etc.
The author points out that Dell is getting very aggressive with price with much lower margins. We use Lenovo workstations because that is who our IS has a deal with, but we don't pay retail. We would probably get this system for $7k to $8k.
bobbozzo - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
The worst part of it is Lenovo's markups on the CPUs are VERY high... Thousands of dollars more than purchasing 2 CPUs from Newegg. for the UPGRADE to the faster CPUs.bobbozzo - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
In other words, I could buy the base system from Lenovo, and buy 2 faster CPUs from Newegg, and save thousands of dollars.Perhaps the same holds true for RAM and disks.
theduckofdeath - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
That is really not a clever thing to do, then you can just as well build the whole system yourself, because whenever you silk call the manufacturer for support they definitely will start the conversation with " start by removing all of those parts you bought from someone else, reinstall the whole thing, and then you call us back. Okay?" :-)theduckofdeath - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
*would, not silkHaribol - Monday, November 26, 2012 - link
Honestly that is a rip off. If you shop around on sites like e@GAy etc..you will find a good deal. Why pay retail? I have seen systems for half the price Lenovo.com is selling them for. If you search for D30 you will see numerous systems, check it out if you are interested. And sometimes you can call the sellers and bargain. As long as they make some money they will sell it and it will be 30-50% off lenovo's website. I recently got a D30 and price was 50% cheaper then Lenovo's website. Same warranty and hardware on lenovo's website. The key is using your intelligence and shopping around. Generally regarding the warranty they will tell you to take off everything that didn't come with the system from the factory.Haribol - Monday, November 26, 2012 - link
Honestly that is a rip off. If you shop around on sites like e@GAy etc..you will find a good deal. Why pay retail? I have seen systems for half the price Lenovo.com is selling them for. If you search for D30 you will see numerous systems, check it out if you are interested. And sometimes you can call the sellers and bargain. As long as they make some money they will sell it and it will be 30-50% off lenovo's website. I recently got a D30 and price was 50% cheaper then Lenovo's website. Same warranty and hardware on lenovo's website. The key is using your intelligence and shopping around.Zink - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
quiterwei - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
16 cores? 32 threads? Dang.But then I read Johan's article.
Man you just got one-UPPED.
sna2 - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
actually you can make a 80 cores workstation today using 8x10 cores xeons thats 160 threadscheck supermicro X8OBN-F motherboard
and X9QR7-TF
Ozymankos - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
The system tested today is a standalone workstation and not a server to be used in a cluster or a supercomputerTherefore,it is less important to have user-serviceable power supply,as it is likely that this PSU will last for a long time for a single unit
It has 2 octocore processors,with double the processing power of the similar Dell workstation/server
Adn the price is only 50% higher ,so it is a good workstation for most people
mapesdhs - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
Note that absolute CPU clock can have a major impact on Viewperf results, as I found out
when testing a 5GHz 2700K with a Quadro 4000. See:
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/viewperf.txt
In many cases it leaves the results given here in the dust (eg. 83.31 for LW, 16.63 for ProE).
The reason is some of the tests are single threaded on the CPU side or so lightly threaded
that a higher clock makes a huge difference. If you want to run ProE, then yes have a good
GPU, but shove it in a consumer machine with a single good oc'd 4-core or 6-core i7 and
it'll run much quicker than one of these OEM workstations. YMMV for other apps/tasks, but
for Viewperf it's interesting how oodles of cores at a lower clock so often loses to just one
4-core i7 at a high clock.
Ian.
sna2 - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
I really cant understand the pricing of workstations ...here is the same exact system self made ...
1- SUPERMICRO X9DA7 (C602 with SAS and dual Lan and usb3 ) : 524$
2-2x Intel Xeon E5-2687W : 2x1800$ : 3600$
3- 8x2G exx Registered : 160$
4- NVIDIA Quadro 5000 2.5GB GDDR5 : 1750$
5- Seagate Savvio 15K.3 300GB : 350$
6- DVD : 50$
7- SeaSonic X-1250 1250W GOLD : 250$
8- Windows 64 pro : 130 $
9- best case 500$ worth
total 7314$
there is no justification whatsoever for 3000$ more !!!
Haribol - Monday, November 26, 2012 - link
Shop around on eBay, Google, Amazon for the best deals. Never pay retail !!!I bought a Brand New System on eBay for 50% off lenovo.com's website. Same system at Lenovo.com was close to $15,000 without taxes and fees. I bought it for $4200 dual xeon 2650, 5 SSD Drives (LENOVO Drives) and 64GB Factory ECC 1600mhz Memory and mid-range Quadro. So please don't get ripped off by paying factory pricing. Search on Google, Amazon, Ebay for the best deals.
Hope this helps.
icuimp - Saturday, November 17, 2012 - link
Just thought i would point out a Sandforce based SSD is not suited for video encoding especially a slow 60GB model.SSD was probably holding back the encoding results due to slow transfer rates (~60MB/sec write speeds).
Try something non sandforce based and retest please!
Oscarcharliezulu - Saturday, November 17, 2012 - link
I haven't used a real workstation class PC since the Dell I had in 2000 (remember rdram?), but it was truly awesome, internal design alone made it worth the money. I've had a dozen PC's but that is the one I remember most. Man was it stable and fast. This article made me nostalgic for it, so thanks.Wixman666 - Sunday, November 18, 2012 - link
In the future, it would be nice to see how these multi thousand dollar workstations compare to a single CPU overclocked enthusiast box with a high end video card.An i5 3570k or 3700k at 4.6+ and a geforce 670 or 680 just so we can get some perspective. Pretty sure that it would be middle of the pack and at 10% of the cost.
I see that you have a puget in there with the i5 2500k, but it has the on chip video. That's a pretty worthless addition to the charts when we're talking about high end graphics workstation performance.
alpha754293 - Monday, November 19, 2012 - link
....and the SSDs that ARE rated for enterprise usage puts another $2000 or so on top of the cost of a $10k system.That's why they don't use SSDs.
The plus side though - if it did - the SSD might be a PCIe card rather than SATA 6 Gbps.
I would have LOVE to have seen some HPC benchmarks performed on this system in order to figure out what it's real performance would be like.
And 16 GB of RAM for a system like this is really nothing. Considering that you can get Alienwares now with that much RAM...*shrug*...
(The most memory I've used is somewhere around 96 GB range...on a system that had 128 GB.)
dtolios - Monday, November 19, 2012 - link
Modern games have little to do with cores...very few of them will care for the 8-threads a 2600K/3770K has to offer over a 2500K/3570K. In case some should (happens in some cases and extreme resolutions, Tri-Quad SLI and the works), a 3930K would beat most Xeons (1P, 2P, 10P - w/e).Single threaded performance is still very important in most fields. CAD, CG and video editing included.
Again, fast i7s (and sometimes fast i5s) will beat Xeons due to faster clocks. Add O/C to make multithreaded performance of a s2011 hex-i7 unrivaled even by mid-range 2P systems.
16GB of RAM and 60GB SSDs are a joke - period. So are the monies asked to upgrade them (over market prices) when building to order such workstations by Lenovo, Dell, HP etc.
Ppl that believe that 2P is a limiting factor, think again: which Windows OS distribution you think allows you utilize more than 2P systems? Def. not Win 7 64bit ;-)
Haribol - Tuesday, November 20, 2012 - link
I saw one for sale on eBay. Which has 4 X Lenovo SSD Drives and 2TB. Has 64GB of memory. I might just give an offer to that guy see how much he takes. I used the D20 and I really like these machines. They are not pretty like the dells but they are rock solid.http://www.ebay.com/itm/230858459957
How much you think that is worth?
Haribol - Tuesday, November 20, 2012 - link
Why DDR3-1333 memory. The ones I have been looking on CDW and Ebay say it comes with 1600 Memory.