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
Conclusion: When is a Win Not Really a Win
The Lenovo ThinkStation D30 is definitely, full stop, the fastest desktop workstation I've tested. That's a mantra that's been repeated over and over again in this review but it's essentially correct, on paper and in practice. Whether or not the potentially massive increase in performance is appropriate for you and your business is really going to depend on the workloads you're going to be throwing at it and just how valuable your time is. I know that for independent video houses, every minute is precious, so it often makes sense to just buy the most CPU horsepower you can get your hands on. A configuration like the D30 would be a good fit for those.
For CAD, Maya, and other workstation tasks, the SPECviewperf results come in very handy for figuring out exactly which workloads need what, and how much you can gain from the move to a Quadro 5000, dual octalcore Xeons, or both. Of course, if you're doing mixed workloads that are just going to soak up every last ounce of performance they can get, it's probably a good idea to go big.
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So where does the Lenovo ThinkStation D30 fall in the competitive enterprise landscape? Unfortunately, Lenovo's in the same unenviable boat that HP is in right now, having to compete with an unusually aggressive Dell. Enterprise workstations mean big, big money with high, high margins, but a hungry Dell is making life difficult for organizations that aren't going to be as forward-thinking or agile.
Case in point? Dell's Precision T7600 workstation offers many of the same independent certifications Lenovo's D30 does, but does so with a superior internal layout in terms of serviceability and convenience, can be rackmounted, and comes in at $7,653 for almost the exact same system configuration. That's $3,200 less than Lenovo is charging per unit for a system that's designed to be more serviceable. If you need a bunch of these, Dell will basically give you four better built systems for the cost of three of Lenovo's.
Right now, the fact is that unless you're pretty strictly in bed with Lenovo, there's just no reason to buy the D30 over Dell's Precision T7600. The ThinkStation D30 needs a smarter, cleaner, more serviceable chassis design and it needs to at least hit price parity with Dell. Until then, Lenovo runs the same risk HP is running right now on the desktop workstation side: being an also-ran and losing out to a vastly more hungry competitor.
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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.