DigitalStorm Slade Pro Workstation PC Review
by Dustin Sklavos on April 23, 2014 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- desktops
- Xeon
- Quadro
- DigitalStorm
- Workstation
- Octalcore
When it comes to performance, the DigitalStorm Slade Pro is definitely a strong contender. The octalcore Ivy Bridge-EP CPU is one of the best workstation chips you can buy, and the NVIDIA Quadro K4000 is an efficient and capable partner for professional rendering tasks. If performance is your primary deciding factor in looking at a workstation, then DigitalStorm certainly has you covered here.
As far as pricing, we're still in the ballpark, but it's a little hazier. Dell will charge you $5,527 for a similarly configured Precision T5610 system, ~$300 less than this one, but theirs includes a dual socket workstation board and ECC memory and comes with a three year professional level warranty complete with on site service. HP wants nearly $3,000 more for a comparable system, pricing them out of competition. Even with their 20% coupon code, you're still looking at ~$1,500 more. And Lenovo wants a hilarious $3,500 premium just for a $2,000 CPU. Ultimately, Dell continues to be the one to beat.
And that's kind of the issue that DigitalStorm ultimately faces. There are things you can get from DigitalStorm that you can't get from Dell: the 4TB hard drive, the blu-ray reader, the liquid cooling. But these are comparatively small potatoes. As long as Dell is this hungry in the enterprise space, system integrators are going to have an extremely hard time producing a value proposition to compete with them. Dell's cheaper, their service is more capable, their warranties are longer, and the parts are workstation class across the board.
Compared to other system integrators, DigitalStorm makes a solid argument for their Slade Pro. The performance is there, it's quiet, it's efficient, and the components are generally quality. But the elephant in the room for SIs is going to continue to be Dell for the foreseeable future. They win on price, arguably win on service, and on value adds. The Slade Pro is the finest system I've tested yet from DigitalStorm, and for small businesses who just need one or two solid workstations it's a fine alternative to ordering from the evil empire. But for everyone else, I'd still strongly recommend sticking with Dell.
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ddriver - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
LOL, genius config - spend the extra money on a premium price RE (raid edition) drive and put it sole in the system... Why RE drive sans actual raid?ddriver - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
I guess to try and justify that ridiculous, dare I say criminal profit margin on the system, by using unnecessarily expensive components...You can use that money to build an identical if not better system twice over...
Strunf - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
hmm RE is the entreprise class of WD, it comes with a 5 years warranty and that tells a lot about how confident they are in it.I don't think you should cut corners on something like an hard drive.
ddriver - Thursday, April 24, 2014 - link
WD "blacks" also come with 5 year warranty. As do raptors. RE is considered enterprise because enterprise is considered RAID. But if it is regular PC system pretending to be enterprise in a desperate attempt to justify a ridiculous profit margin that doesn't even have actual raid, there is really no point of a RE drive, except to perhaps indicate very little thought was put into putting the configuration together, and what little was there was how to make it appear to be more worthy of its price tag, to the brilliant decision that an unnecessarily expensive hard drive not even put to its actual purpose will contribute to that image. If it is to be a single drive, a black or raptor is a much better fit, considering the lack of ECC memory and a bunch of other factors, plus they can work in RAID and improve redundancy too. I would definitely go for RE if I begin with the intent of a RAID array.otherwise - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
I am curious if they turned TLER off. You do not want TLER on for a single drive since you want to let it take as much time as it wants to recover from errors. This drive has it on by default, because, well, RE=RaidEdition (originally); and for a RAID setup TLER is a feature you want.If TLER is still on, it's just another item on the list that shows these guys don't really know what they're doing.
Flunk - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
Putting a Xeon on a consumer board is a complete waste, the only reason you need to pay the premium for Xeons is their support of the higher-end workstation boards and ECC ram. EVERYTHING ELSE IS LITERALLY THE SAME AS A Core i7. Putting a Xeon on a consumer board is just like throwing out money and I feel they're only doing it to advertise this as a "workstation".Intel's Xeon line has always been extremely overpriced with very little differentiation from the consumer lines. They just hold back on support for multiple processors, ECC and some instructions to make sure that those who can afford to spend more, have to.
zanon - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
This. I got to "not ECC" and just stopped reading, that's not a workstation that's a bad joke. Spending $4K+ on a system with a very expensive Xeon processor and they don't even bother with a workstation board and memory? Hahaha, no.puppies - Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - link
Can you get me some of these magical 8 core i7s pls.mrcaffeinex - Thursday, April 24, 2014 - link
LOL I was wondering the same thing.There are flaws with the component selection and especially the price, but I do not question the Case, CPU, HDD, SSD, or Video Card choices. In my experience the WD RE drives, whether used in RAID or not, are excellent workhorses that run forever. The same has been true of the Samsung SSDs that I have used.
The CX750M is not a bad PSU and it is semi-modular, but I understand the complaint when there is this much of a price premium for the system. I would have expected at least a Gold if not a Platinum PSU in this price range.
Perhaps the initial markup is one of those ploys where they offer a 15% discount on the MSRP, but set the MSRP so high that they still make a significant profit per unit? Plus, I would have to imagine that the demand for this level of system must be pretty low.
Depending on the source cited, Macs seem to represent anywhere between 5 and 10% of the PC market. As far as I know, this includes all of the Mac product line, of which Mac Pros are a fraction of sales. I would imagine that for any of the other OEMs, these high-end workstations represent a similarly small percentage of their total sales, even if you limited things to only include other high-end non-workstation units. DS's volume discount on components is probably not that great due to the limited numbers being sold.
akdj - Friday, April 25, 2014 - link
"Depending on the source cited, Macs seem to represent anywhere between 5 and 10% of the PC market. As far as I know, this includes all of the Mac product line, of which Mac Pros are a fraction of sales." Well over 10% in the states, japan and Europe...closer to 20%. Sales of computers OSx style are UP! Opposite for PC (Window's sales for all OEMs). Try ordering a new MP. Just go to apple.com, configure your rig, get to check out and see the wait time for shipping. They can't make enough right now!