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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theduckofdeath - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link
*rack mountedafkrotch - Wednesday, November 21, 2012 - link
It doesn't take a fanboy to see that Apple simply updates too slowly and that just isn't going to be an option where time is money.melgross - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Very amusing. You must do standup.twtech - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
I would expect at least 32GB of RAM, preferably 64GB. There are other uses for a machine like that, but some compilers can use as much as 1.5GB per thread. With 16GB of RAM, you wouldn't even be able to use half the threads without hitting the swap file.Joschka77 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Thats exactly what i was thinking, too.Got an HP Z 820 with two E5 2680 and 128GB of RAM next to me...
This thing is a beast...
Rick83 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
Got a z820 as well a few months ago, but IT's standard layout is 8x2 GB as well.ordererd 4x8GB to add - but the board doesn't support that as 48GB combination, so only running 32gigs.
Need moar memory.
Colleague is eyeing ordering another 32 to at least get the machine to be slightly more usable..
Joschka77 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
As far as i know mixed RAM sizes should be possible; have you had a look at the Service manual for the Z820? There´s a hint in what order the Dimms should be placed. ->heres a link:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/C...
afkrotch - Wednesday, November 21, 2012 - link
My last job I was running a Dell T7500. The more ram, the better. I didn't need as much processing power, but needed memory. Was using it for system integration work, so I was running multiple VMs. 16 gig of ram and I was running out all the time. Having to pause/shutdown a VM to fire up another one.duploxxx - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
If you want to really push the build quality and design, don't compare a 2 socket WS with 1 socket systems.You need to compare this system with a HP z620 and a Dell T5600.
If you really want to bring the added value over these way overprised CPU you need to find very specific applications to do so... for 99% they are never needed besides EGO. These days most will run just fine with a 1 socket WS with all the cpu power existing today.
extide - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
For the people who buy these systems, even dual E5-2687W's is still too slow.