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
Build Quality
Speaking candidly, Lenovo's internal design for the ThinkStation D30 may be at least somewhat competitive with HP's Z820's interior, but it's worlds behind Dell's Precision T7600. The design philosophy Dell rolled out with the T3600, T5600, and T7600 is probably the most thoughtful and detailed one I've seen in the workstations I've tested; Lenovo's interior in the D30 is comparably very staid and even a bit archaic in some respects.
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For starters, the cable management is pretty poor for a system like this. For comparison's sake, below is the interior layout of the smaller Dell T3600. This isn't the most fair comparison since the D30 is a deeper case and has to support two processors, but I think the decisions involved in the design come across well enough.
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Quite frankly, Dell's design is just cleaner. A lot of this owes to the modular power supply design they're using in their modern workstations; power supplies are designed to be easily removed and replaced out of the back of the case by the end user. Meanwhile, Lenovo's design still has a mess of cables spewing out of the back of the power supply. It's just sloppy, and worse, if the PSU goes, that's going to mean a tremendous amount of downtime.
Noise, Heat, and Power Consumption
Unfortunately HWMonitor flipped its lid trying to read the operating temperatures of the D30, but monitoring the system under load with AIDA64 revealed generally reasonable thermal performance. Noise was also for the most part a non-issue as it often is with these workstations, which is really impressive when you think about it. Lenovo was able to keep the noise level below the 30dB floor of my sound meter at idle, and then under load it peaked at a noticeable but still very tolerable 34.5dB from a foot away.
As for power consumption, it goes without saying that the D30 is going to be a bit of a monster. The combined rated wattage of the CPUs and GPU is 452W on its own, and that's ignoring the eight DIMMs and 15K-RPM mechanical hard drive.
It takes a lot of juice to sit at the top of the charts, but when you're pushing for as much raw performance as you can get (as you would with a system like this one), power consumption is really going to be a secondary concern.
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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.