Dell Precision T3600 Review: Dell's New Enterprise
by Dustin Sklavos on April 23, 2012 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Dell
- Precision
- Workstation
- Maximus
Workstation Performance
I've tried to stress this before but it really does bear repeating: workstation-class graphics cards, whether or not they share silicon with desktop parts a quarter of the price, pay for themselves in performance. The NVIDIA Quadro 4000 in the Dell Precision T3600 demonstrates that; as a gaming card it would be woefully underpowered, but as a workstation card operating in situations that leverage both the optimized OpenGL drivers and formidable double precision performance, it easily justifies itself.
Notice how in most cases, the GTX 580 with a fully enabled Fermi core gets massacred by cards with half the shader power or less. The Quadro 5010M in the HP EliteBook 8760w is the only GPU that's able to consistently outperform the Quadro 4000, and that makes sense: it has similar clocks, but it boasts 128 more CUDA cores. It's also the fastest mobile workstation GPU available, bar none.
If I had to guess, I'd say that once desktop graphics limitations are taken out of the equation, the proe-05 test gets stuck on single-threaded CPU performance. Meanwhile ensight-04 is the only test that focuses on pure GPU performance and doesn't care about optimized drivers.
The Xeon E5-2667 runs at slightly lower clocks than the Core i7-990X, but it benefits from the more efficient Sandy Bridge-E architecture while the i7-990X makes do with Gulftown. Lightwave definitely wants the fastest CPU it can get, though, and the E5-2667 delivers.
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ggathagan - Tuesday, April 24, 2012 - link
Dustin,I realize this is a preview, but was RMT demonstrated to you, or did Dell simply describe its operation to you?
If you are able to do a full review in the future, that would be one of the 1st things I would want to see tested.
Doberman777 - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
Hmm, I'm reading that the new Mercury Playback Engine in Adobe CS6 apps dumps the use of CUDA in favor of OpenGL/OpenCL, whereas the NVIDIA website is claiming that their Quadro cards with CUDA further enhance performance. Which is correct, and in view of this, I'm really confused about choosing a new graphics adapter for CS6 apps.Hansz - Friday, July 6, 2012 - link
Our t3600 appears to have only 2 working SATA ports onboard (SATA0+SATA1). There are 4 more Sata ports which are labeled HDD0 - HDD3 but they dont appear to work. Those HHD ports cannot be seen or activated in BIOS. Some PCI-E controller has been added by Dell which allows more than 2 drives. However it would be nice to be able to use more than 2 onboard SATA ports.So what's up, did Dell decide to disable the additional ports because of some problems?
Also the BIOS info about 3x HDD Fans is a bit confusing as there do not seem to be any HDD fans.. there are 3x system fans..
Mafeer - Thursday, February 7, 2013 - link
Hai,how is this system for working auto desk 2013 products like auto cad, 3ds max and maya rendering. our main purpose is rendering 3ds max and maya.
below the specs which i received from one of my vendor, could any evaluate this,
Model – Del™ Precision™ T3600
Base – Standard 635W Base
Processor – Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-1620 (Quad Core, 3.60GHz Turbo, 10MB)
Memory – 16 GB
HDD – 1 TB
Graphics – 2 GB NVIDIA Quadro 4000 (2DP & 1DVI-I) (1DP-DVI & 1DVI-VGA adapter)
Operating system – Windows 7 Professional (64Bit) English
Thanks
Caryn - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Curious if this would be a good computer for me to do my Photoshop (PSE9) and my husband to do his gaming (WOW, etc) ?? I have an older Dell and its been a great computer but having a hard time handling what we are making it do these days. Looking for a new yet not so expensive system and trying to compare. Advice appreciated :) Thanks!!Chris Rodinis - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - link
Here is an overview of the T3600: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99VvEY58m9g