This has been an eventful first outing with Boston's Venom GPU workstation solution.  To reiterate from the introduction, this is a well constructed system with ample room for expansion and upgrade.  The unit is very well priced and for those running in on a tight budget, this just might satisfy your requirements.  The clever IT purchaser will have looked at this unit very carefully; in a long term strategy it will fit the bill nicely as an additional add-on render node to their farm as well as a powerful workstation as there is plenty of power under the hood.

Although this is undoubtedly  AMD's day at the races, it has to be noted that Supermicro has pulled out all the stops very quickly with the appropriate BIOS needed to support the new Istanbul CPU's.  The mainboard follows in the same neat yet  functional protocols laid out as we have witnessed with their other mainboard offerings.  In order to get this article live, primarily to show the Istanbul CPU performance, we have not been able to cover everything this feature rich system has to offer. We will very soon complete a more thorough investigation covering the detail you all would have liked to have seen.

This is a big and powerful system and so we expected a symphony of sound.    Recently we have seen a few noisy HSF and PSU's and it has to be said if you are looking for quiet, then this should be your first point of call.    The unit lives up to the Supermicro claims of being whisper quiet and delivers acoustics pleasing to the ears.    The Supermicro chassis provides plenty of upgrade paths for additional 5 1/4" bay peripherals and with 5 other 3 1/2" bays empty storage is certainly not going to be a problem.    From this prospective Boston are certainly onto a winner.

Performance within the synthetic benchmarks came bang in on what AMD had quoted so their homework here has been well done.   Within the professional benchmarks and applications here is where we saw the greatest leap.  Cinebench 10 returning some pretty remarkable outputs in both single and multi CPU tests.   Whilst the POV-RAY 3.72 beta benchmark came romping home with some pretty spectacular scores.

The Boston Venom GPU workstation combined with AMD's Six Core Opterons are remarkably resilient - the more we threw at it - the more it wanted.  Spectacular to say the least.   It will be interesting to see how the new AMD Shanghai Quad Core Opteron CPU's will cope with  the  present generation of mainboard.  If we reflect to the results shown within the article, developers and programmers now will be having many thoughts on the actual way ahead.    The technology shown today from AMD is good and will just give that added value that some end-users are looking for.  Todays offering has to be hailed as one of the most momentous advancements achieved within a short timescale from AMD.

Pricing and availability.   Pricing for the unit shown today swings in at  £4199 UKP / €4550 Euro's (Ex. Taxes and Shipping - Pricing in Euro's is subject to current exchange rates.  Errors & Omissions Excepted) and is backed up with a 3 years return to base warranty.  Availability of the Boston Venom - if you call today and order you will be surprised at how quickly 7 working days passes.  There is anticipated to be a mad rush for this type of unit.   Optional upgrades and pricing please discuss directly with Boston as the upgrades and pricing are all particular to each individual customer.

It is early days to forecast just how effective this new architecture is going to be embraced within the community.  Initial impressions from here are good and as one final point of note to show how much the hardware has improved in over a year.  If we briefly hop over to the SPEC® website and look at the SPEC Viewperf 10® results a year ago from this submission, todays results speak volumes for themselves.

Though for those wishing the easy option, it will look like this.

Red is better/higher in all instances

Therefore what we are witnessing here is a significant performance and technology update from both the new AMD Istanbul Six Core Opterons and the NVIDIA Quadro® FX3800.  Both companies have completed their homework exceptionally.

The combined efforts of both Supermicro's hardware with Boston's build skills in conjunction with the new AMD's SIX CORE Opteron - get your orders in now.

www.3dprofessor.org award for BOSTON'S GPU System

EDITORS RECOMMENDATION – MID RANGE GPU WORKSTATION SOLUTION

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - The System
Page 3 - System Set-Up and Benchmark/Applications Used
Page 4 - Sandra 2009 SP2
Page 5 - ATTO Benchmark and Everest Ultimate 5.01
Page 6 - POV Ray 3.72 Beta and Cinebench 10 - 64 Bit Tests
Page 7 - 3DS Max 2009 Scenes
Page 8 - SPECviewperf® 10.0 and SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™
Page 9 - Conclusions
Page 10 - Bonus Section (Shanghai 2.7GHz Results)