System Builds and Software Used

Our array of “in house” test systems has now been fully completed as over the forth coming months, many exciting things will be happening here that will have you aghast with awe. Both Supermicro and Intel certainly pulled out the stops with these excellent parts which in turn means we can now demonstrate with the newer peripherals coming online the best possible results. This in turn will demonstrate to you the end user just what to fully expect when you purchase systems of the like we have here in situ.

With the supplied parts on show today these main parts now form part of our “mainstay in house” test systems supplied courteously by AMD, Akasa, Intel, Crucial Memory, NVIDIA and Supermicro; which could be found in most high-end studios and enthusiast workstation scenarios. These are very reliable and sound workstation platforms which have an abundance of scope for upgrading, which we have voiced on many occasion.

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 builds we completed sometime back with Supermicro’s X8Dai Rev 2 mainboard which has still many reeling from the results it obtained and armed of course with a pair of 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. Thrown into the mix as these new mainboards are just hitting the streets, we put into place Supermicro’s new X9SCA mainboard that support both Intel’s Sandybridge Xeon E Series 1280 (3.5GHz) CPU’s for workstations encompassing the Intel® C204 PCH chipset. Interestingly enough both surpassed themselves providing exemplarily results. At times we could not tell the difference when they were stacked up side by side, therefore it goes to show just how much work has gone into all of the equipment that is vital to the test.

These formulised builds used will mean that the results shown within will be extremely clear to the reader.

On a side note and very important one. Many self-build corporate and studio users maintain the philosophy to utilise one mainboard which provides them with an effective cost performance solution. Time is money as too are extra peripherals needed to supplement a mainboard. Once the mainboard has reached end of life in the usage it was built, mainboards of this nature then find them stripped down and placed into a 2U chassis as a dedicated server or render node. Therefore the life span of these Mainboards and supporting CPU’s is extremely good, which brings us back once more to exceptional value for monies. Deviating slightly the server capabilities of these mainboards are very good with so many added value features that have been listed, therefore whilst we have covered these board heavily in a workstation scenario it must not be forgot that implementation of a server will be very good indeed.

From the professional graphics cards front, taking into account the actual brief given we took to the fore the most up to date professional graphics cards from each company listed below.