With an exclusive outing of this magnitude we had to sit back very carefully and decide what to use. After much deliberation we decided to move forward with our ultimate workstation build we completed last week with the first viewing of Crucial’s new C300 RealSSD and Supermicro’s X8Dai Rev 2 mainboard which has still many reeling from the results it obtained. Of course last but not least the superb Intel Westmere 3.33GHz CPU’s which are without doubt superb in performance and therefore we have to show the best on an exclusive like this.
Component | Test System |
Mainboard | Supermicro X8DAi (Rev 2 Mainboard) with latest Bios |
CPU | 2 X 3.33GHz Intel® Xeon® X5680 Nehalem EP®, 12MB Shared Cache, 6.4GB/s QPI |
HSF Coolers | 2 X Noctua NH-U9DX 1366 |
Memory | 6 X 2GB Crucial DDR3 (12GB Total) 1333MHz |
Graphic Card (s) | Nvidia Quadro® FX4800 (WHQL 197.70 Online Driver) |
Nvidia Quadro® FX3800 (WHQL 197.70 Online Driver) | |
Hard Drive | 256GB Crucial C300 RealSSD connected to ASUS U3S6 PCI-E Card |
6 GB/s PCI Controller | ASUS U3S6 in Secondary X16 PCI-E Slot with latest WHQL Drivers |
PSU | Akasa Freedom 1000Watt |
Hardware Suppliers for the Review
Intel EU for the supply of the 3.33GHz Intel® Xeon® X5680 Nehalem EP® CPU’s
Supermicro for the supply of the X8DAi Rev 2 Mainboard shown within the Test System
Crucial Memory for the C300 RealSSD and the DDR3 1333MHz Unbuffered ECC Memory, thank you for pulling out the stops here.
NVIDIA for the supply of the Quadro® FX4800 and Quadro® FX3800 professional graphics cards.
Noctua for the supply of the Heatsink Fans critical to the high end Xeon systems
With the support and help of all the companies involved. It gives you the reader a choice on upgrade paths that many of
you look for here with the performance ratio’s the system has to provide and notwithstanding the professional graphic
cards from NVIDIA.
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 Used 64-bit Mode
Microsoft Windows XP Professional 64-bit SP2 (Latest build and fixes)
SPECviewperf® 11.0 64-bit.
The benchmark has been applied on the clean system hard drive complete fdisk of the SSD was completed and this
would ensure that no residue drivers were left installed with all updates/patches applied. In this instance a test/render
has been completed many times over different periods of the system uptime. Whilst maintaining the fair play rules of
SPEC® HyperThreading and Turbo Boost have been enabled, with the memory being left in its default status of Auto.
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 seem prudent to think that this is correct.
The next few pages briefly cover the Viewsets for each of the applications and will give you all a very good idea what has gone into each
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – System Set-Up and Build
Page 3 – CATIA Viewset (catia-03) and EnSight Viewset (ensight-04)
Page 4 – Lightwave (lightwave-01) and Maya Viewset (maya-03)
Page 5 – Pro/ENGINEER Viewset (proe-05) and SolidWorks Viewset (sw-03)
Page 6 – Siemens Teamcenter Visualization Mockup Viewset (tcvis-02) and Siemens NX (snx-01)
Page 7 – Nvidia Quadro® FX3800
Page 8 – Nvidia Quadro® FX4800
Page 9 – Conclusions