Lenovo ThinkStation D30 Workstation Review: 16 Cores and 32 Threads Under Your Desk
by Dustin Sklavos on November 15, 2012 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Lenovo
- Quadro
- Workstation
- Sandy Bridge E
- Enterprise
- Octalcore
Application and Futuremark Performance
On paper, the Lenovo ThinkStation D30 I have in for review is the fastest desktop I've ever tested and should easily best the other workstations I'll be comparing it to. The Quadro 5000 is the most powerful workstation GPU (up to this point I've only tested the 4000) on the charts, and dual Intel octalcore Xeons should give any system a run for their money. At the same time, keep in mind that the PCMarks are extremely dependent on storage subsystem performance, and I get the distinct impression that's going to be the achilles' heel of this review system due to the mechanical hard disk.
The 3DMarks defer to the Quadro 5000 as they should, but the two HP workstations both enjoyed SSDs as their system drives instead of the mechanical drive in the D30, and even eight more 3.1GHz cores can't really pick up the slack.
Pushing single-threaded applications is an absolute waste of the hardware in the D30, but the instant anything multi-threaded comes in the extra eight cores come on line and the system surges ahead. What I find most interesting, though, are the x264 results. Despite having half the CPU power, the HP Z420 is able to actually beat the D30 in the first pass by three frames. In the second pass, the extra eight cores in the D30 only offer a roughly 33% boost in performance.
Suspecting the storage subsystem was holding the D30 back, I grabbed a spare 60GB OCZ Vertex 3 I had laying around and plugged it in, then ran the x264 benchmark off of it. The results were actually very surprising, and in retrospect I may have been too hard on Lenovo for their decision, as the D30 crunched through the video in roughly the same amount of time.
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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The Mac Pro, besides being horrifically overpriced as Apple's only normal desktop, is running hardware TWO generations out of date.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.