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If you only know about Lenovo’s laptop computers, you’re missing out on the performance beasts that are the ThinkStation workstation computers. PCMag got a hold of one of the new ThinkStation S20 workstations, packed with a quad-core Intel Xeon processor, 4GB RAM, and an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 graphics card.
The S20 is no bargain-basement machine priced at over $3600 as-tested, but it is truly a professional quality machine with a lot of features that give it an edge. Hit the link for all the details
Source: [PCMag]
Filed under: Deals & Coupons, Lenovo News
Tags: thinkstation s20
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I don’t understand what’s supposed to be so great about this. As far as I can tell, it’s another white-box PC except it’s black. It has one cpu socket and 4 dimm sockets, but they compare it with a (more expensive) Mac Pro that has two cpu sockets and 8 dimm sockets. It is interesting that they offer it with RHEL instead of Windows. I hope they start offering RHEL on Thinkpads since I didn’t like SuSE at all, and they stopped selling it.
For the same $3600 I can get a Pogolinux 1U server with two quad-core AMD Phenom CPU’s and 64gb of ram in 16 registered ECC DDR2 dimms (it’s unspecified whether this S20 has ECC memory, which any self-respecting so-called professional workstation should certainly have). Registered dimms are fairly inexpensive in 4GB these days and available (super expensive) in 8GB, so I could put 128GB in the Pogolinux box if I had infinite cash. It’s not clear what kind of memory the S20 uses, but if it’s typical DDR3 unbuffered desktop memory, 4gb modules are quite expensive, so I could put in 8gb at reasonable prices or 16gb by spending big bucks, either amount being piddly compared with 64gb.
The large manufacturers really seem to be behind the times in underpopulating their machines with ram sockets. Yes, Intel X25-E SSD’s are pretty fast at 230 mb/s transfer and 0.1 msec seek latency, but commodity PC2-5300 memory is 20x faster at transfer and 1000x faster at random access. There are many applications that would perform a lot better if they had that much ram available, and with ram so cheap these days there’s no reason not to build boxes with such capacity. Even in the commodity desktop format, I don’t understand why they didn’t put in six sockets instead of 4, since the Intel chipsets for DDR3 support that (triple channel). That would allow putting in 12gb or 24gb, which is starting to get beyond what you can put in a laptop.
I realize that a rack-mount, headless server and a graphics workstation with an NVidia board aren’t the same thing, but the issue of ram sockets affects both of them. For my own applications, I’d rather have the server humming noisily in the back room while I use my nice quiet Thinkpad as a front end.