Puget Systems Genesis II Quiet Workstation Review
by Dustin Sklavos on May 22, 2013 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Xeon
- Puget Systems
- Workstation
- desktops
Application and Futuremark Performance
As the mobile benchmarking suite has been updated recently, the desktop suite is going right along with it. Thus there may not be quite as many comparison points between the Puget Systems Genesis II Quiet as we'd like, but enough to at least get a feel for how the system performs.
This is the second dual-CPU workstation we've tested; the Lenovo ThinkStation D30 is the first, and features two faster Xeons owing to their higher 150W TDPs.
In terms of pure graphics performance, the GeForce GTX 670 is miles ahead of the anemic stripped down GF100 powering the Quadro 5000 in the Lenovo D30, but remember that this is a consumer card competing with a series of workstation cards. PCMark continues to be limited principally by storage performance and clock speed.
In multi-threaded testing, everything lines up as it ought to. The two octalcore Xeons in the Genesis II are incredibly fast, but the D30's are faster.
Our original x264 encoding test demonstrates about what we'd expect. The initial pass is not as heavily threaded as the second, and benefits more from high clock speeds than copious core counts. When we can leverage the additional throughput in the second pass, the Genesis II surges forward.
This is as good a time as any to point out why $4,000 of eight core Xeons are for very specific tasks, and why we haven't seen (and may not see for some time) an enthusiast-class octalcore i7. More cores mean more heat, which means reduced clocks. Six cores (twelve threads) have been, in my experience, about the limit for what a consumer or even prosumer can really take advantage of, and quad cores really are excellent for almost everyone in that class. This isn't one of those "better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it" situations, either; as the test results for x264 and PCMark 7 demonstrate, if your workload can't take advantage of the extra cores you've effectively left performance on the table by going for more cores instead of fewer, faster ones. That's why you're seeing dual-CPU workstations but virtually no dual-CPU enthusiast machines.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
18 Comments
View All Comments
Death666Angel - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
"if your workload can't take advantage of the extra cores you've effectively left performance on the table by going for more cores instead of fewer, faster ones."Wasn't Turbo Boost and the like supposed to take care of that issue? If the other 2/4 cores in the hexa/octa core aren't used, power gate them and allocate the left over TDP to the active cores by increasing their clocks. Unless that only works until 4 cores and not above, it seems to be more an arbitrary limitation Intel puts in place to cement their profits, like they do with various other feature differences between processors. I don't see a reason they can't release octa core for the enthusiast market as an extreme edition for the LGA2011. They just don't want to cut into their Xeon market share and profits is my guess. Same reason why there aren't hexa core LGA1155 CPUs (I don't buy that the platform can't feed them fast enough).
SodaAnt - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
I think the reason is that there's more power limitations. It takes a lot more power and thermals to run 8 cores, with 2 of those cores at a really high clock frequency, than it does to run a simple duel core computer at the same high clock frequency.cknobman - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
The review talks about how cool the configuration runs but we never get to see any temps.Why no temps?
Death666Angel - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
Penultimate site under "Noise and Heat".alpha754293 - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
I wonder how the GTX Titan would have performed on the SPEC Viewperf 11 benchmark...bminor13 - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
Seconded; would the GTX Titan compete with the workstation cards in terms of compute performance (price and cost-effectiveness aside)?RoslynWan12 - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
til I saw the receipt 4 $9132, I accept that my brothers friend was like they say really bringing in money part time on-line.. there sisters roommate had bean doing this for only about 6 months and resently repaid the mortgage on their place and purchased Acura. this is where I went, Bow6.comCHECK IT OUTRedStar - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
case sure looks a whole lot like my p180 antec case