Lenovo ThinkStation P300 Workstation Review: Haswell plus Quadro
by Ian Cutress on November 4, 2014 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Intel
- Lenovo
- Seagate
- Quadro
- Workstation
- Haswell
- desktops
- Enterprise
- NVIDIA
Workstation Performance
For our performance analysis, we will split this into two parts. Firstly we will add in the data for the system as it was sent, in a 1x8GB DRAM configuration. After this is a discussion with 2x4GB results, showing the importance of maintaining a dual configuration setup. For comparison points, we are picking up Dustin’s array of workstation review results, although a couple of the newer benchmarks have fewer data points.
| Lenovo ThinkStation P300 (Xeon E3-1276 v3 + Quadro K4000) vs DigitalStorm Slade Pro (Xeon E5-2687W v2 + Quadro K4000) |
||
| BENCHMARK | DigitalStorm Slade Pro | ThinkStation P300 |
| PCMark 8 (Home, OpenCL) | 4879 | 3834 |
| PCMark 8 (Creative, OpenCL) | 4094 | 3160 |
| PCMark 8 (Work, OpenCL) | 4591 | 4505 |
| Cinebench R15 (OpenGL) | 102.85 | 118.6 |
| Cinebench R15 (Single-Threaded) | 123 | 158 |
| Cinebench R15 (Multi-Threaded) | 1218 | 769 |
| x264 5.0 (Pass 1) | 95.53 | 69.16 |
| x264 5.0 (Pass 2) | 25.43 | 16.58 |
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.
Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Image Manipulation – FastStone Image Viewer 4.9: link
Similarly to WinRAR, the FastStone test us updated for 2014 to the latest version. FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and thus single threaded performance is often the winner.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. The principle today is still the same, primarily as an output for H.264 + AAC/MP3 audio within an MKV container. In our test we use the same videos as in the Xilisoft test, and results are given in frames per second.
Rendering – PovRay 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision RayTracer, or PovRay, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
55 Comments
View All Comments
Pork@III - Tuesday, November 4, 2014 - link
Only 8GB RAM place on workstation PC in fall of 2014? Poorest IBM! Poor, poor, poor! :Dkissiel - Tuesday, November 4, 2014 - link
Lack of any amount flash storage is even more frightening...MadDuffy - Tuesday, November 4, 2014 - link
The SSHD storage is hybrid solid state and traditional.jimbo2779 - Tuesday, November 4, 2014 - link
The SSHD is hardly a patch on a real SSD store. I could not imagine running a WS on anything less than an SSD on SATA III.akula2 - Wednesday, November 5, 2014 - link
I use lot of Samsung 850 Pros and SanDisk 960GB ExtremePro SSDs. But this Mushkin Scorpion Deluxe 960GB PCIe SSD decimates those models (PCIe 2.0 x8 interface).Hence, I shall buy more for the upcoming X99 high-end; for ultra builds (Xeons), I'm pondering on Intel's NVMe enterprise solution (1.2TB SSD). Price is justified because it offers literally ultra performance.
Samus - Wednesday, November 5, 2014 - link
Sloppy. An elitedesk it is not.noelbonner - Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - link
Yes it's sloppy and poorly ranked in CONSUMER BASED rankings, see http://is.gd/L7YVjK for example.testbug00 - Tuesday, November 4, 2014 - link
which does about nothing. I have one. Unless they completely redesigned how they worked in the last 3 years (which, I doubt).At this point, personally, I just wish I could use the SSD in my hybrid drive to boot the OS and maybe 1-2 other things... But, nope =[
chizow - Tuesday, November 4, 2014 - link
I have an SSHD and while it is definitely not SSD speeds for sustained transfers or random I/O, it does a really nice job in two areas:1) Cached file information. Anyone dealing with video editing will appreciate this. The video info and previews load much faster than a traditional HDD due to the SSD cache.
2) Overall operating temps. Possibly because they don't need to spin up as often, my Seagate SSHD is cool to the touch while my retired WD Blacks could probably cause a burn.
They also have higher capacities available like a traditional HDD would making them pretty affordable overall.
Samus - Thursday, November 6, 2014 - link
I agree SSHD's are great alternatives to SSD's in certain machines. But they do not belong in laptops (honestly any mobile device should have no moving parts outside of a fan...for obvious durability reasons) and they don't belong in workstations where there is space for a SSD boot drive and a HDD storage drive.SSHD's make a lot more sense in home PC's where media storage is common and common HDD performance is a huge bottleneck. Many home users simply don't want to deal with two drives/partitions and most systems these days only have one drive bay, such as AIO's.