System Set-Up and Benchmarks Used

Hardware Suppliers for the Review

Supermicro for the supply of the X8DAi Mainboard and 2 X 32GB Intel Enterprise SSD's

Intel EU for the supply of the 3.2GHz Intel® Xeon® W5580 Nehalem EP® CPU's shown within the Test System.

Crucial Memory  for the DDR3 1333MHz Unbuffered ECC Memory, thank you for pulling out the stops here, currently DDR3 ECC memory is a very limited supply option from most memory makers.  On going to print we have been advised by Micron/Crucial that their is a good supply of this memory module.

NVIDIA for the supply of the Quadro® FX3800 professional graphics card

Akasa for the supply of the Chassis and PSU

Systems Integrators, OEM’s and VAR’s should contact all companies directly for pricing and availability of all components.    Members of the public should contact their respective suppliers requesting the parts directly.

Benchmarks and Software 64-bit Mode

The test system shown within will be readily found within many arena's soon, therefore those just wishing the simple upgrade of either the ATI FirePro V8700 or NVIDIA Quadro FX4800 they can see readily how much performance gain has been achieved

Microsoft Windows XP Professional 64-bit SP2
3DS Max 2009 Scenes
Cinebench 10 64 Bit
POV Ray 3.72 Beta
SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™
SPECviewperf® 10.0 – 64-bit.   Tests ran at 1280 X 1024 Resolution.

Each set of tests has been applied on the clean system hard drives shown above to ensure that no residue drivers were left installed with all updates/patches applied.   A test/render has been completed many times over different periods of the system uptime.   Maintaining the fair play rules of SPEC® we did not manipulate any of this mainboards functionality and left it at its default settings in which it was supplied.   Tests have been conducted at 1280 X 1024 @ 60Hz in 32 bit colour.   Results that have been shown within this article are from the application/benchmarks first run in accordance with the SPECviewperf® and SPECapc fair play rules.  Not an average of 3 runs as some places seem to think is right. 

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - Introduction Continued and Close Up Pictures
Page 3 - System Build Pictures
Page 4 - System Set-Up, Applications and Benchmarks Used
Page 5 - 3DS Max 2009 Scenes
Page 6 - Cinebench 10 64 Bit  and  POV Ray 3.72 Beta 64 Bit
Page 7 - SPECviewperf® 10.0  and SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™
Page 8 - Conclusions and Award