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
Workstation Performance
While the PCMarks and some video encoding may favor an SSD-based system (though the 15K RPM Seagate Savvio in our review unit is no slouch), the SPEC workstation benchmarks should pretty aggressively favor Lenovo's solution as the NVIDIA Quadro 5000 and dual octalcore Xeons are the highest specced parts we've yet tested.
Any test the D30 doesn't win, it basically ties, and when it does win it often wins big. The tcvis-02 test seems to be workstation GPU dependent, and proe-05 and lightwave-01 both seem to favor the slightly faster top clock speed on the Xeon E3-1280 v2, which is able to take one core up to 4GHz; both benches are definitely banking on single-threaded performance as the major differentiator. The combination of 150W of GF100 GPU power and 300W of Xeon cores certainly gets the job done, though.
Interestingly, while SPECapc Lightwave definitely sees gains from the additional eight cores, they're a little more subdued. The D30 is definitely shaving whole minutes off of the running time compared to the Z420's single E5-2687W, but the extra cores just aren't as pronounced as they are in some of the SPECviewperf tests.
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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The Mac Pro, besides being horrifically overpriced as Apple's only normal desktop, is running hardware TWO generations out of date.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.