Dell Precision T1600: Workstation Class
by Dustin Sklavos on May 2, 2011 4:55 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- IT Computing
- Dell
- Intel
- Xeon
- Precision
- Workstation
- Enterprise
- NVIDIA
Conclusion: A Reliable Workhorse
First, let's dispense with the elephant in the room: yes, it's much cheaper to build your own workstation. If you were using consumer grade parts off the shelf, you could easily chop half the price tag off of our review system. Most of the enthusiasts here could build a substantially faster machine for less money, and the components in that machine would be warrantied for at least as long as the Dell Precision T1600.
Unfortunately, that's a problematic perspective. Even taking consumer/business product segmentation out of the equation, most businesses big or small don't have the benefit of someone like me or someone like you. I'm essentially in business for myself as a filmmaker and videographer, but I know how to tune an overclock and maintain my tower. If a part fails, I know how to replace it. I can build, tweak, and tune until the cows come home. Businesses typically don't have that luxury--or a desire to get into that sort of technical support.
In those instances, they're going to want a machine that's ISV certified for the applications they need to run; they may very well even need to create a small farm of machines like this. When I was in school we had a lab full of enterprise-class machines just like this T1600 designed for compositing/video editing and Adobe After Effects work. (And just to ruffle a few feathers, it's mostly independent houses that standardize on Macs and Final Cut Pro; smaller users like me are agile enough to use whatever's available and major production companies have been using Avid on PCs since time immemorial.) A business is going to need a machine they can rely on and service to back it up, and Dell is willing to provide both of these.
That being said, it's hard not to feel at least a little fleeced by Dell's upgrade pricing. The T1600 starts at 2GB of non-ECC DDR3, and the upgrade to 4GB is a ridiculous $135, nearly three times what that memory sells for at retail. Go up to ECC memory and suddenly the price explodes, with 8GB costing a downright obscene $780. This tower supports up to 16GB of non-ECC or 32GB of ECC DDR3. Crucial will sell you the same 8GB of ECC DDR3 at a lower price than Dell wants for 4GB of non-ECC kit. That's ignoring the $100 markup on the NVIDIA Quadro 2000 graphics card or the $200 markup on the processor. Workstations don't come cheap, but some of this is downright Apple pricing.
What you're really paying for are the certifications and the support. The T1600 is an entirely serviceable piece of hardware, comes with Office 2010 Starter standard, runs quietly and mostly efficiently (though 65% efficiency on the default power supply certainly isn't a selling point), and it will do the jobs it was intended for. Until HP refreshes their workstations with Sandy Bridge based Xeons, the Precision T1600 stands to be the only game in town and it's a fine one. Just be ready to pay for it.
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mrmj2u - Tuesday, May 3, 2011 - link
Two Dell T7500 machines under my desk right now...Dual Quad Core W5590 processord @ 3.33Ghz
10TB HD Space using LSI RAID 9260-81
24GB RAM...
ATI Firepro V5700
Ah but its still my work machine ;)
zdzichu - Wednesday, May 4, 2011 - link
I'm surprised to see ATX form factor. After all, traditional desktop from Dell (Optiplex) sports BTX board for a long time.Tor-ErikL - Wednesday, May 4, 2011 - link
Good to see that Anandtech goes workstation ;)Our company has been using workstations for many years in our dellivery's. And we actually use them as gaming devices. The quadro 4000-5000 doesen't do that bad compared to geforce. However with quadro you will get a stable running card that lasts for 5 years, this is also true for workstations. I dont mind paying extra for that stabillity - in the projects we delliver hardware is only about 10% of the cost anyhow.
Last time we tried geforce we bought 35 workstations and 35 geforce cards, turned out that about 25% percent of the geforce cards was failing after just a few weeks. So in the end the small ammount of money we saved by using geforce in the purchase, we ended up loosing big time due to replacement of defective cards.
Hopefully we will see a review of the HP Z800 workstation. And i hope anandtech also compares graphic performance against game engines !! The difference between the old FX series and the new quadro series is BIG !
The best target quadro card would be 4000 since this is good money for your buck compared to performance. It's also still single slot and with low power req's
My own testing on quadro versus geforce shows that the 5000 card is not that bad compared to geforce 580 - And the quadro 6000 card would probably come close.
Would love to see anandtech run all the new quadro cards against geforce, i think there is a myth tha says quadro is bad when it comes to gaming. Yes the quadro drivers are not optimized for games and the old FX series was crap. But dont judge the new quadros based on the old FX series. Same goes for Xeon CPU's !
Tor-ErikL - Wednesday, May 4, 2011 - link
Company's like us doesent care if a graphic card costs 300USD or 900USD, we tend to look at other aspects than price when we buy ;)Fozzie - Thursday, May 5, 2011 - link
Sorry to say, but I've deployed several of these T1500/1600 series Precisions and the build quality is nothing like the 3400/3500. The 3000 series and higher are built like tanks with fantastic case design. The 1500/1600 series is more like a cheap Vostro version of a Precision with the outward appearance that is largely a plastic facade.Not that this is an issue that ultimately would probably decide or break whether to purchase this or not. Just an FYI.
Etern205 - Thursday, May 5, 2011 - link
be nice, if you spend a fortune on a machine to have at least a couple of USB 3.0 connectors in the front!Max- - Thursday, May 5, 2011 - link
It's nice that Anandtech has decided to test workstations, but i think that the review still needs a lot of work. I work on broadcasting and all the computers we use are naturally workstations. Here's my comments on workstations benchmarking and on what i see important:Skip the game benchmarks completly, if you're buying a workstation for professional use it's completly irrelevant information
Skip the comments about some parts costing more than what you can buy as components in PC shops. If you're buying workstations you're buying the possibility to have a tested system, that'll work and run when it's critical. Not only CAD people and engineers use work stations, TV-studios, broadcast in general, sound engineers etc. all use workstations.Price is rarely the #1 driving factor. But do keep comments about memory upgrades and other component upgrades costing too much from the manufacturer.
Run tests with the GPU & CPU cores stressed to 100% for 24 hours. If i'm rendering something i don't want the computer to die from heat, i want to know that the product is solidly engineered and will keep running when left on to do work.
If a workstation is configured in raid 0 it's not usable for critical situation. It's absolutely not possible for a workstation to die in tv-studios or sound stages for example. Raid 0 adds too much uncertainty. If you need the speed, you go SSD or use external storage, raid 0 is basically never seen. Raid 1 however, is.
Video encoding, rendering, specviewperf are relatively good tests. But try finding some other tests as well. Many video codecs are single threaded, some can be encoded multi threaded. I want to know how the computer manages doing single threaded and multithreaded tasks on video encoding. I also want to know stuff like how many 100-200mbits/s videostreams i can simultaneously write on the HDD.
Weirdly i also want to know how quickly the system boots up, since if something crashes the computer, every second waiting for it to boot up costs a lot of money.
How many sound tracks can i write simultaneously on the HDD with ProTools? How badly does the speed degrade when the HDD gets full?
Noise tests are very important as well. If the computer is not sitting in a machine room behind a KVM it'll be sitting close to the user. Noise can get really irritating very quickly, specially if there are many of the computers in the same space. Both load and idle tests should be done on noise. Saying things like "whisper quiet" take a completly new meaning when you put the workstation in a sound mixing enviorment for example, or a control room of any kind. What you take for "whisper quiet" in a home enviorment doesn't really mean a thing when reviewing workstations.
The computer will in some cases be installed in racks in a machine room, or a soundproofed rack closet. What kind of rack mounting brackets does the manufacturer provide? How deep is the computer? Supermicro enclosures for example are often so deep that you need to make sure you have deep enough rack closets. How well does the enclosure circulate air from the front to back (or back to front) when mounted inside a rack closet?
What kind of monitoring and managing capabilities has the manufacturer built in? Will i get e-mail alerts on failing parts? Will the BIOS be able to bootup the computer every morning at 7am for example? I might want to close the computer for the night, but i don't want to walk into a machine room to boot it up the next morning.
How many network cards do i have? Can i use load balancing on the 2 integrates NICs? Having 2 is better than 1, since often some computers can sit on several separated LANs.
When i open up the enclosure, is it designed so that when mounted with sliding rack brackets i can just pop the lid off and throw in a replacement HDD? I don't care if cables are neat or not, as long as i can access the system and replace a broken component if i have to.
Power supplies might or might not be a issue. Heat generation is always an issue.
Reliability is key when it comes to workstations in my opinion, and should be kept in mind when reviewing them.
ochentay4 - Friday, May 6, 2011 - link
you sir made the best comment in this article. i totally agree with every point you made.unnameduser11 - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
why is the graphics card nvidia? i bought mine and it has intel hd graphics