| Workstation reviews: Dell Precision 690, Sun Ultra 20 M2, CAD 2 |
| Tuesday, 08 August 2006 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| This month Dell’s new Precision 690, which features Intel’s new ‘Woodcrest’ Xeon 5100 Series processor, sets a new standard in workstation performance. Meanwhile, Sun offers great price/performance with its Ultra 20 M2, while CAD 2 targets the specialist sector. Specifications
Dell Precision 690As you will have learned from our report on page 3, Intel certainly looks to have a winner on its hands in the form of the new Xeon 5100 series processor, codenamed Woodcrest. How do we know this? Well, we were lucky enough to get hold of two of these new generation dual core processors courtesy of Dell and housed inside its brand spanking new Precision 690 workstation, and they literally ripped through all of our computational benchmark scores! We were almost left speechless. The Precision 690 is Dell’s new generation flagship workstation. It’s a beast of a box, one of the largest and heaviest workstations we’ve had on test, and features an interesting chassis design which lets air flow straight through the machine from front to back. This is made possible by the front panel being raised slightly, behind which are some fairly sizeable holes punched into the metal chassis. The airflow through the system is great, but I’ve got a feeling you could end up with a fair amount of dust inside your machine in the long term. Dell has obviously spent a lot of time and money designing this system to run cool as it’s incredibly quiet, even when hammering both processors during the recent heatwave. It does this partly by compartmentalising the machine so memory and CPUs are in one section, graphics and any PCI cards in another, and hard drives in a third so heat isn’t transferred from one component to another. The system uses some chip wizardry to mange several large fans and in conjunction with the heat pipes that cool both Xeon processors it all seems to work very well indeed. Of course, taking heat out of the machine is only one part of the equation, if there’s less heat put into the machine in the first place, then you’ve solved half your problrms already, and this is where Intel’s new Xeon processors score highly by producing significantly less heat than previous generation Intel CPUs. The processors in question are the new 2.66GHz Xeon 5150s, which feature a superfast 1,333MHz Front Side Bus and 4MB of Level 2 Cache. These are dual core processors so the Precision 690 test machine actually has four CPUs (or cores) in total, meaning there’s plenty of power in reserve for running multiple calculations in the background, or simply making light work of hefty calculations in multithreaded applications. The rendering speed under 3ds Max, for example, is simply astounding. Despite setting new records in all of our computational benchmarks, there is still more to come from the Precision 690. An additional £200 will currently upgrade you to two top end Xeon 5160 processors, which run at 3.0GHz. Dell offers all single and dual CPU combinations for the entire Xeon 5100 Series in the Precision 690 from 1.66GHz right up to 3.0GHz, but also makes available the Xeon 5000 Series. Strangely, it will currently cost you an additional £860 to upgrade to two 3.73GHz Xeon 5080 processors, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking more GHz = more performance. A Xeon 5080 is not only slower than a Xeon 5160, but as it draws twice the power, it will probably be noisier as well, as the fans will need to work harder to expel the additional heat. However, it should be noted that Intel’s hyperthreading technology is embedded in the 5000 Series and not in the 5100 Series, which some users may find beneficial. The Precision 690’s fully featured motherboard is based on Intel’s new 5000X chipset and boasts a total of eight memory slots for a maximum of 32GB. Just in case this isn’t enough - when running a 64-bit Operating System of course – an optional memory riser adds eight more slots taking the capacity to 64GB. This is enough memory to model or analyse pretty much anything an engineering company could throw at it. In contrast our test machine featured a measly 2GB, which we’d recommend you double immediately, particularly if you’re thinking of buying the system with Windows XP x64 Edition. Incorporating yet another new technology, Dell’s Precision 690 features an integrated LSI 1068 SATA/SAS controller, which supports RAID 0 and 1. Two 73GB 10,000RPM SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives drop easily into a cage, which is set perpendicular to the motherboard making it easy to add or change drives if required. SAS is the successor to SCSI and makes the Precision 690 feel extremely responsive, particularly when dealing with datasets in short bursts. The test workstation is rounded off with ATI’s excellent FireGL V7200 graphics card, one of six professional 3D graphics cards available for the system. The 256MB V7200 is a good mid-range card and provides more than enough power for most CAD users, and this was reflected in the excellent benchmark scores under SolidWorks, Inventor and 3ds Max. I’m not a fan of its looks, and the chassis is somewhat overbearing, but there’s no doubting the pedigree of Dell’s new Precision 690. It’s a fantastic machine, with superb scalability and unrivalled performance and provides an excellent platform to welcome in Intel’s new generation Xeon 5100 series. Specifications
Sun Ultra 20 M2With UNIX workstations a dying breed in the CAD/CAM/CAE sector, Sun Microsystems had little choice but to try and get itself a slice of the Windows workstation market. Its first attempt was with the Sun Java 2100z, a beautiful looking Opteron-based workstation that could run Solaris, Linux and Windows. The problem was that Sun seemed to miss the whole point of why Windows-based workstations were so popular and slapped a UNIX-style price tag on a machine that you could buy from another vendor for nearly half the price. Having learnt its lessons, Sun went onto release the Ultra 20, an affordable, single socket Opteron workstation that could take single and dual core processors. Moving from one extreme to another, Sun became the first Tier One OEM to offer a cost effective Opteron-based workstation. Sadly, despite continued effort on our behalf, we never managed to get hold of one of these machines for review. However, all is not lost, as in line with the launch of AMD’s brand new Opteron 1000 series processor, we are first magazine to take a look at the new Ultra 20 M2, and what a lovely little machine it is. The first thing we should get out of the way is that Sun does not sell workstations with Microsoft Windows pre-loaded. Sun and Microsoft aren’t exactly the best of friends so for customers to get a Sun workstation pre-loaded with Windows, they have to buy their machine from a third party reseller. Sun does, however, provide full support for its Ultra 20 M2 for those that take it up. The system can, of course, be shipped pre-loaded with Solaris 10 or Red Hat Linux and dual boot systems are also available. The machine itself is a perfect example of how to build a simple workstation. Its compact chassis is understated in its design, and inside the motherboard sits neatly to the left hand side of the case. This leaves the right hand side free for an easily accessible hard disk caddy, which is fitted so drives slide out easily away from the motherboard. 3.0GBps Serial ATA is standard, but the Ultra 20 will support SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) early next year. As with its predecessor, the Ultra 20 M2 has a single CPU socket on the motherboard, but this time it features AMD’s new Opteron 1000 Series processor. This is a dual core processor, which is offered from 1.8GHz, up to 2.8GHz, and provides support for faster DDR2 memory, something that has been lacking in Opteron workstations for some time. In addition to running faster, DDR2 is also available in larger capacity modules. With a total of four slots and with 2GB modules widely available, the Ultra 20 M2 has a capacity up to 8GB, which is great news for those looking to work with huge models on 64-bit Operating Systems. With 4GB DDR2-677 ECC memory and a 2.6GHz Opteron 1218 dual core processor the test machine is well equipped for most mainstream CAD users. Sun has a long standing relationship with Nvidia and offers a choice of three professional 3D graphics cards in the Ultra 20 M2, the Quadro FX 560, Quadro FX 1500, and Quadro FX 3500. The test machine featured the mid-range Quadro FX 1500, which provides excellent price/performance and more than enough power for most 3D CAD applications. In putting the Ultra 20 M2 through its paces we were a little disappointed with the performance as we had hoped that the introduction of DDR2 memory would give the Opteron a boost. Unfortunately the scores that the 2.6GHz Opteron 1218 produced under our CPU benchmarks were virtually identical to those of the previous generation 2.6GHz Opteron 185. Still, this doesn’t mean that Sun’s Ultra 20 M2 is not an impressive workstation. Performance is still excellent and more than enough for most mainstream CAD users and the compact chassis with its classic minimalist design is sure to be a hit with many. The Ultra 20 M2 also scales down well and a 1.8GHz Opteron 1210, Quadro FX 560 and 2GB DDR2 RAM combination, offers an excellent entry-level machine in a market that has been dominated by Intel-based workstations for so long Specifications
CAD2 Vision A185GT 64Featuring a hard drive system for which you wouldn’t get much change out of a grand, CAD2’s latest workstation is certainly a specialist bit of kit. The system is based on the new Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) technology which is the next evolution of the Ultra 320 SCSI interface that used to be the mainstay of high end workstations. CAD2’s system is centred on Adaptec’s 4805 SAS RAID card, an eight-port controller that supports SAS, SATA or SATA II disk drives and features more Raid configurations than most users would know what to do with. Luckily, CAD2 is on hand for advice, and for this review opted for ultimate performance with two 36GB Seagate Cheetah 15,000RPM SAS drives configured in a Raid 0 array. So how good is this technology? On test we did find SAS reduced the time taken to load applications and CAD models, though not by a huge margin. The greatest benefits came with small data sets or with short bursts of data when the system kicked instantly into action. This is partly down to the massive 1MB cluster size, which the test system had been set up with, but CAD2 is able to fine tune this technology for customer’s individual needs and we are advised that smaller cluster sizes would improve performance for larger data sets. The rest of the system is made up of much more mainstream workstation technology - a dual core 2.6GHz Opteron 185, 4GB PC3200 DDR memory and an ATI FireGL V5200 graphics card. This combination provides an excellent platform for most CAD users and this is reflected in the benchmark results where the machine delivered solid results across all applications. It’s also interesting to note that our tests showed that there is virtually no difference in computational performance between CAD2’s older generation Opteron 185-based Vision A185GT 64 and Sun’s new Opteron 1218-based Ultra 20 M2. Both processors run at 2.6GHz, but the CAD2 machine uses DDR memory compared to Sun’s DDR2. As always, CAD2’s attention to detail is exemplary - the chosen Silverstone chassis is classic in design and solid in construction and the system is put together with evident love, without a stray cable in sight. CAD2 has produced yet another excellent workstation, albeit one for the specialist market, but for those that consider SAS a luxury, the Vision A185GT 64 is also available with a more standard Serial ATA hard disk system, which of course will take a good chunk off the substantial price tag.
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