The dawning of time is now upon us, its a new evolutionary beginning and the long awaited new era of Workstation Xeon's, Workstation Platforms and Servers from Intel have finally arrived. The shattering Intel® Nehalem-EP Processor. Much anticipation of this new arrival has been awed at the briefings those of you that have attended behind the closed doors. There has also been huge amounts of information has got out online and into the various magazines. This has helped many in different walks of life to make great decisions to hold back on their current spends and embrace the new architecture as it will bring forth many added bonuses of faster outputs and better service.

Today's outing focuses firmly on the new S5520SC workstation/server variant after all the primary focus of all here is the performance on the professional graphic's front. We have seen over the past few moths a huge leap forward in the single socket i7 platforms and the huge impact is has made in many areas of productivity. As predicted last year on the i7 launch, the uptake has been great and many have seen colossal improvements never witnessed before, though this is to be predictable with such a massive technology leap. Some slow, others have been very rapid to embrace the new technology very quickly indeed. Will the same results been seen here for the Nehalem-EP Processor, we foresee this to be so.

A tremendous amount of work has gone into looking at the baseline performance of what the Nehalem-EP has to offer the professional graphic card industry. Maintaining equal ground showing no bias to any one company results gained from each are displayed on a singular dedicated page. Notwithstanding how much additional improvements have been gained from both ATI and NVIDIA's new workstation professional graphic's cards. A busy time has been seen by all. Current WHQL drivers meant much more productivity gains with the aid of Intel's Nehalem-EP Processors new architecture. Therefore with what has been already witnessed by all here we now have to ask ourselves, just how much more is to be achieved from this spanking new variant. All will be revealed in time.

Before we head into the folds of performance of the cards and the system we first must take a brief look into the new CPU's and then the mainboard and supplied chassis.

Intel® Nehalem-EP Processor

The Intel® Nehalem-EP processor family is the first-generation DP (dual-processor) server/workstation processor to implement the following key new technologies:

• Intel® QuickPath Memory Controller
• Point-to-point link interface based on the Intel® QuickPath Interconnect (Intel® QPI), which was formerly known
  as the Common System Interface (CSI).

The Intel® Nehalem-EP processor family is a series of multi-core processors based on the 45nm process technology. Processor features vary by SKU and include up to two Intel® QPI point to-point links capable of up to 6.4 GT/s, up to 8MB of shared cache, and an integrated memory controller.

Therefore we see a complete set of 10 new processors of varying differences though we have highlighted briefly below 7 of them;

The processor family supports Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2), Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (SSE3) and Streaming SIMD Extensions 4 (SSE4). It also supports the following advanced technologies: Execute Disable Bit, Intel® 64 Technology, Enhanced Intel® SpeedStep® Technology, Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT), and Simultaneous Multi-Threading.

Therefore we see an excellent range of CPU's to support the new platforms in many arenas and to suit all pockets. It goes without saying that many cheque books will be primed ready to go with the full scale launch of product availability.

The architecture and design of the Intel® Workstation Board S5520SC is based on the Intel® Tylersburg I/O Hub (IOH) and the ICH10R chipset. The chipset is designed for systems based on the Intel® Xeon® processor in an FC-LGA 1366 Socket B package with Intel® QuickPath Interconnect (Intel® QPI). The chipset contains two main components: the Tylersburg IOH, which provides a connection point between various I/O components and the Intel® QPI; and the I/O controller hub (ICH10R) for the I/O subsystem. The chipset uses the ICH10Rfor the I/O controller hub. This diagram provides a high-level description of the functionality associated with each chipset component and the architectural blocks that make up the S5520SC workstation board.

The All Important Processor Population Rules

For optimum performance, when two processors are installed, both must be of identical revision, core voltage, and QPI/core speed. When only one processor is installed, it must be in the socket labelled CPU1. The other socket must be empty. Processors must be populated in sequential order. Processor socket 1 (CPU1) must be populated before processor socket 2 (CPU2). No terminator is required in the second processor socket when using a single processor configuration.

Page 0 - Introduction
Page 1 - Mainboard and Pictures
Page 2 - Mainboard (continued) and Build Pictures
Page 3 - System Set-Up and Benchmarks Used
Page 4 - Sandra 2009 SP2
Page 5 - Everest 5 Ultimate
Page 6 - ATI FirePro V8700 - Cinebench and POV Ray 3.71 Beta
Page 7 - ATI FirePro V8700 - 3DS Max 2009 Scenes
Page 8 - ATI FirePro V8700 - SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™ & SPECviewperf® 10.0
Page 9 - NVIDIA Quadro® FX4800 - Cinebench and POV Ray 3.71 Beta
Page 10 - NVIDIA Quadro® FX4800 - 3DS Max 2009 Scenes
Page 11 - NVIDIA Quadro® FX4800 - SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™ & SPECviewperf® 10.0
Page 12 - Conclusions and Awards
Bonus01 - *Exclusive* Introducing the ATI FirePro V7750
Bonus02 - *Exclusive* Introducing the NVIDIA Quadro FX3800