Supermicro 5046A-XB arrives, Workstation Review Opinions Requested...
by Gary Key on January 21, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Gary's First Looks
We received numerous emails and forum messages after our last X58 articles requesting that we take a different look at this platform. One that is not consumer/gaming oriented and instead focuses on the workstation capabilities of Intel's latest platform featuring the i7/X58. With that in mind we have been working diligently on a new test suite oriented towards the workstation crowd. The problem we discovered is that one could end trying to procure and test so many various programs that the review never gets done.
Believe me, that is one bad habit of mine after reviewing my initial rough draft for our first user experience article. After melding a few spreadsheets, pasting together all of the test notes, and looking at the results, it hit me that we had tested 83 different components, 22 games, and 37 different applications, not too mention a dizzying combination of hardware combinations for the memory and overclock results. The outcome is that this article is now under the editor's knife for obvious reasons. Probably the primary reason is to keep the reader awake and focused on the actual motherboard being reviewed, which happens to be the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P before we move on the 790GX/GF9300 products.
So, for those readers who are passionate about viewing workstation results, we would like to hear from you again. Mainly, what are your top three to five programs that you would like to see tested on this platform. While we have procured several video/audio content creation applications along with other business centric programs, we fully realize there is diversity in the workstation market. With that in mind, we want to focus our efforts on providing relevant coverage and results for the top applications where possible. We use the word possible, as procuring a $40K seat license for a particular CAD/CAM package will probably be outside our current scope as one example. Also, we want to tailor the test suite to the hardware received for review.
That said, the wizards over at Super Micro Computer, Inc. sent us their new 5046A-XB bare bones workstation. This kit features the C7X58 motherboard, a high quality 865W power supply, custom designed cooling system, pre-configured Hot-Swappable drive setup, and a Tower case that feels as if it were built out of granite. The base bare bone 5046A-XB MSRP is around $900 and will vary depending upon the options chosen. Based on current test results, this Supermicro solution is a bargain to us.
We are still wrestling with our first 24GB memory kits (not a board problem), but all of our initial tests indicate that Supermicro has done a wonderful job with this platform. We have not needed or required multiple BIOS releases for stable operation, the custom cooling system is very quiet, the case is easy to work with and the internal wiring is impeccable. As an added bonus, the hot-swappable bays are a breeze to use, especially considering the number of times we installed and removed some firmware challenged Seagate drives. We are still working on 24GB memory results and some additional digital content creation tests, but performance has been flawless so far.
To say we are pleased at this point would be a serious understatement. Besides a meticulous design, customer service and technical support has been superb to date. We will be back with a full review, but this product already has our blessing. In the meantime, drop us a note and let us know your opinions on workstation benchmarks.
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blackmetal - Saturday, January 31, 2009 - link
Hi,I second that too, thumbs up for some form of additional "standardized" virtualization benchmarks.
I'm the support guy and I often end up with different running VMs to help me help others!
georgema - Thursday, January 29, 2009 - link
I've been looking at the servers and workstations from Supermicro for a while now and I think that the 5046A-XB is a very interesting proposition. What I'm looking for is a server or workstation machine that supports large amounts of memory for virtualisation, supports a reasonable number of disks to spread I/O load and has inbuilt RAID or the ability to accept a card.The 7045A-C3B/CTB desk-side servers look like good candidates and they both support up to 48GB of memory and are dual socket so would support 2 x Xeon 5400 series processors for 8 cores. Then along came X58 and the i7 processors and I though wait a minute. Here we have boards supporting up to 24GB of memory and the latest generation of Intel chip, quad core but with HT enabled offering 8 cores of execution. In my mind there's certainly a blurring of lines between high end desktop, workstation and low end server produts.
OK, so what would I like to see tested?
How well does the platform support virtualisation, e.g ESXi using an onboard USB header, Xen or HyperV. Perhaps this is more a question for the Virtualisation Blog but with all the compute power available on the system I think that virtualisation provides a large degree of flexibility in how you can use the power of the system. Perhaps it's more typical that Workstations are dedicated to one task, and hence virtualisation would simply be an overhead, but for me it would be ideal.
I/O benchmarks over 6-8 spindles with ICH10 or with an add-on Raid card. Many workstation applications, e.g. Database, rendering, etc, have heavy I/O loads so it would be good to benchmark an 8 spindle SATA setup .vs. your typical desktop performance. If budget was no issue then get some of the latest SAS drives but that's probably beyond the budget of most small business or home users.
Applications are a bit more tricky and for me I'd like to see some SAP benchmark's but they are probably beyond the scope of what you are trying to look at. Taking a step back then some kind of database benchmark might be useful. Again probably not typical for a Workstation and perhaps I should be looking at server benchmarks but I see this system as squarely in the middle of low end server (single CPU) territory. More traditional apps would be transcoding for the different media devices that seem to be around the home today.
Your comments about the build quality are interesting as well. The target customer for Supermicro is not the home tweaker enthusiast but business. Businesses don't have the time or patience to upgrade BIOS to make the basic product work. They expect it to work out of the box and keep working out of the box. That's how the HP's and IBM's of this world sell servers and that's the background that Supermicro comes from. I have thought about building my own workstation/server from components but when I see something like the 5046A-AB I ask myself should I simply just buy it and be done with it. The weak pound doesn't exactly help with pricing but even so time is money and all that and build .vs. buy is always a trade off. Perhaps I should build something a bit less demanding like a storage server with OpenFiler, unRAID or the like.
Just my two pence worth and it will be interesting to see how this system comes out in the review and how it compares to other systems.
George
yyrkoon - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
Yeah, just in case Photoshop is not obvious ; ) Not being a mechanical engineer myself, I was surprised that a few that I have talked to in the past actually like to use Photoshop vs autodesk inventor for various things. Autodesk inventor might be a good benchmark as well assuming it is not out of your price range.fredsky - Monday, January 26, 2009 - link
if you could, please useafters effects cs3 and cs4 benchmarks.
lots of my friends buy quad core machine for AE. and also on the Mac platform (that will use it somedays).
http://www.media-motion.tv/aebenchmarks.html">http://www.media-motion.tv/aebenchmarks.html
Mclendo06 - Monday, January 26, 2009 - link
I understand that sparse matrix operations are often memory limited, so I'd love to see how the new Nehalem parts fare versus the last generation of Penryn parts as well as AMD parts. Some of the Intel MKL sparse matrix tools would be particularly interesting for an Intel-only comparison (Pardiso, SparseBLAS...).alpha754293 - Friday, January 23, 2009 - link
yes...I know that $40k CAD packages would probably be out of your league (and I would also presume that even if you got it, you need to have a working data set to test it with; which isn't easy to obtain either).So...having said that...the only thing that I would really like to see on this system would be SPECViewper 9.0.3 and SPECViewperf 10 although those with be more GPU than CPU tests.
If you want to CPU tests; for a CAD system, that's going to be quite difficult to come by unless you're a CAD person yourself. (cuz then you know exactly what to do/what to look for and how you can really "test" the system.) Otherwise, there's no real "industry standard" for testing CAD systems unfortunately. At least none that I'm aware of.
Harm Millaard - Friday, January 23, 2009 - link
I would be very interested to see a comparison between the single CPU i7 versus the X7-DWA-N mobo with dual E5472 in terms of noise, cooling and performance in the same chassis with the same fans and PS. And the effect of the air shroud. Especially oriented towards video applications and encoding (Adobe Production Suite CS4) with different raid configurations, an 8 disk raid 3 versus 5 versus raid 50 with good controllers (Areca 1680iX and the like).Kasper - Friday, January 23, 2009 - link
download a free VHDL/Verilog compiler from ether www.xilinx.com www.altera.com or www.actel.comfind a nice big project and compile it. Check www.opencores.org for some. even the relatively small ones I do takes forever to compile on a fairly fast computer. If a workstation can cut that down, it would make for a lot less wasted time :)
Maverick - Friday, January 23, 2009 - link
The new version of Visual Studio 2008 includes the ability to do parallel builds that take advantage of multi-core systems.I'd love to some benchmarks around it. Send me an email/PM and I can provide some guidelines on how to benchmark this app.
VooDooAddict - Friday, January 23, 2009 - link
As other's have said, I will echo. We need some form of VMWare capacity tests. There's going to be may people out there loading the i7 up with VMWare Workstation, VMWare Server(not ESX), and Microsoft's Hyper-V for Dev/Test. I don't really have enough free time to discuss testing methods.