The first impression ? This is a nice 17 inch professional workstation. The design with the aluminum & magnesium alloy chassis has a simple, stylist look and a solid feel - the perfect combination for professionals. The style is clean and understated. Everything feels solid and firm. No flexing, no weak spots, but not overly imposing or, at a hair over 3.5 kg, overly heavy either.
Dell Precision M6700's technology? The latest Core i7 mobile processors, mine came with a Intel® Core™ i7-3920XM Processor Extreme Edition running at 2.9 GHz with a maximum Turbo Boost 2.0 clock speed of 3.8 GHz. The M6700 can have both AMD and NVIDIA professional graphics and the review unit came with the FirePro 6000M professional GPU. Not only are professional GPUs tested and certified for your professional applications, be it CATIA, Revit, Creo, or SolidWorks, your GPU will also be optimized for the best performance on those applications. AMD has worked with software vendors to optimize the performance of the FirePro on CAD and design software such as you can see in this CADplace report on PTC's Creo 2.0. Finally, storage capacity and memory are not going to be an issue for most customers. The M6700 supports up to 32GB of memory, and up to 4 storage devices including hard drives and SSD drives.
And the workstation is quiet. I love it. The system is next to me now running the Viewperf benchmark and I can hardly hear it. Last year I had a mobile workstation from a different vendor which made more noise while idling.
The machine can be configured with 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows and Linux Red Hat operating systems. If you use 32GB of RAM, then you can use the 1600 MHz memory. Optionally, the system can use up to 16GB of RAM clocked at 1866 MHz. The display's maximum resolution is 1920x1080 and several versions of the Dell Ultra Sharp displays are available as options. The optical drive can write blue ray discs, and the optical drive can be replaced with an additional hard drive.
The unit has a large number of connections listed at the end of the article. A simple touch from Dell was to place the two USB 3.0 connections on the right side of the mobile workstation and the two USB 2.0 connections of the left side of the unit. There is also a 10-in-1 media card reader and a smart card reader. It is possible to connect a display to any one of three connectors, VGA, HDMI, and DisplayPort. The FirePro 6000M also supports AMD's Eyefinity multiple display management feature.
This unit has a sleek design and weighs just 3.52 kg. While that is more than my 17 inch MacBook Pro, it is significantly less than the hefty Celsius H920 I reviewed recently. The 240W power adapter is going to weigh down your computer bag in addition to that, but for a professional, certified 17 inch workstation, this is a pretty reasonable trade-off in performance, capacity, and mobility.
The keyboard offers a separate number pad which is common on this class of mobile workstation and convenient for data entry while working with design and CAD software. The keyboard has a very very solid feeling to it with the keys being quite tactile. After a day or two for your fingers to adapt to this keyboard, it should feel quite comfortable - especially with the large wrist-pad area in front of the keyboard. The touch pad has 2 sets of buttons on it and the keyboard is home to a track-stick. If you use the track-stick, then you will appreciate the extra buttons at the top of the touch pad which can be used easily with the track-stick.
For professional graphics, the Precision M6700 offers options for the AMD FirePro 6000M (my test unit), the NVIDIA Quadro K3000, NVIDIA Quadro K4000, & NVIDIA Quadro K5000. The specification for the AMD Firepro 6000M shows the GPU characteristics and it supports multiple display
| M6000 | |
| Memory & Interface | 2GB GDRR5 128-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 72 GB/sec |
| Multi-display Support | 3 undocked5 docked |
| API Support | DirectX® 11OpenGL 4.2OpenCL™ 1.2 |
| Video Decoder | UVD 3 |
A professional GPU is critical for the graphics performance in professional applications. The FirePro is tested on, optimized for, and certified with professional software. While several important software vendors (ISVs) perform workstation-level certifications, the majority certify specifically the GPU.
Of course the Intel Core i7 CPU is critical to system performance. This 3rd generation Core architecture on the M6700 has a 4-core, hyper-threading CPU with Turbo Boost Technology 2.0, and PCI Express Gen 3 support. Like the other systems CADplace has reviewed, the multi-core, multi-threaded CPU gives the system maximum performance for calculations typical in engineering simulations and high-quality rendering. Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 squeezes the most from the CPU when the application is not loading all the CPU cores with tasks by increasing the clock speeds of the active core(s) dynamically. And PCI Express Generation 3 doubles the speed of data transfers within the workstation architecture, namely between the main sub-systems of CPU, memory, and GPU.
For workstation performance, I ran the Viewperf benchmark on the M6700. Focusing on graphics performance, this benchmark utilizes test data which is representative of professional graphics applications. The Viewperf benchmark is created and managed by specbench.org and is designed to provide performance-comparison data for graphics workstations.
As I have noted before, the data sets are designed on industry applications for engineering, architecture, and visualization like Catia, Solidworks, Allplan, Lightwave, Siemens NX, Pro/Engineer, etc. In addition to using representative datasets, the benchmarks are the results of collaboration and peer-review within the industry. Therefore, comparative testing with Viewperf will provide good information on relative graphics performance for professional usage.
You will find a short history and overview of the benchmark in this article called, “What is this thing called SPECviewperf?” at http://www.spec.org/gwpg/gpc.static/whatis_vp8.html. The benchmark is free to download and use for any professional interested in evaluating the performance of their graphics workstations.
For application specific evaluation, the SPECbench organization also has application-level benchmarks for several leading applications in different professional domains. These are called the SPECapc benchmarks – there is more information here :
http://www.spec.org/benchmarks.html
The CADplace results for Viewperf on this Dell Precision M6700 are :
| Viewset | Composite | |
| catia-03 | 21.44 | The catia-03 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the CATIA™ V5 R19 and CATIA V6 R2009 applications from Dassault Systemes. |
| ensight-04 | 25.14 | The ensight-04 viewset represents engineering and scientific visualization workloads created from traces of CEI's EnSight 8.2 application. |
| lightwave-01 | 60.14 | The lightwave-01 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workloads generated by the SPECapc for Lightwave 9.6 benchmark. |
| maya-03 | 61.62 | The maya-03 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the SPECapc for Maya 2009 benchmark. |
| proe-05 | 6.65 | The proe-05 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire™ 5.0 application from PTC. Model sizes range from 7- to 13-million vertices. |
| sw-02 | 48.49 | The sw-03 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the Solidworks 2009 SP2 application from Dassault Systemes. |
| tcvis-02 | 21.92 | The tcvis-02 viewset is based on traces of the Siemens Teamcenter Visualization Mockup application (also known as VisMockup) used for visual simulation. Models range from 10- to 22-million vertices and incorporate vertex arrays and fixed-function lighting. |
| snx-01 | 28.21 | The snx-01 viewset is based on traces of the Siemens NX 7 application. The traces represent very large models containing between 11- and 62-million vertices, which are rendered in modes available in Siemens NX 7. |
Interfaces
Graphics card options :
The CPU choices are also extensive.
Processor