Dell Precision T1650, T3600, T5600, & T7600 : from top to bottom Dell is offering a workstation that can meet the demands of your applications or the demands of your budget. Certainly there are all of the good features provided in this year's technology refresh of CPUs, professional graphics, memory, and hard-drives, so what is new?
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Let's take a look at all four systems. Don Maynard, Senior Product Manager for Dell Precision Workstations, sat together with CADplace to describe the new Precision line.
This is Dell's affordable professional workstation. It is designed with the customer who runs, let's say “basic” professional applications on their PCs and can benefit from the reliability and ISV (software) certifications that comes from using a professional workstation.
This system is a cost-focused professional workstation. Internally, it is based on the Ivy-bridge platform from Intel and Dell has increased the addressable application area of this system by adding more ISV certifications, increasing the memory support, adding more Xeon processors, and better Turbo-Boost in a single-socket workstation.
Dell's mainstream, single-socket workstation which, in this generation, shares the same Intel Sandy-Bridge architecture as the T5600 & T 7600 workstations. This system has a number of enhancements including an 8-core Xeon CPU option, improved Turbo-Boost, and, for the first time in this class of Precision workstation, support for Tesla C2075 GPU-computing solutions and NVIDIA Maximus technology.
This system can be configured with E5-1600 or E5-2600 Intel Xeon processors. Among other features, this delivers better Turbo-Boost. The improved Turbo-Boost allows for 7 incremental CPU speed increases meaning up to 700 MHz incremental clock increases for a single computing core. Don Maynard concisely describes why this is well-suited for workstation applications. Workstation applications tend to be either single-threaded and interactive in nature, like modeling and design, or multi-threaded and processor-intensive like analysis, simulation, or rendering. Thus, the ability to dynamically optimize the usage and clocking of the CPU cores delivers a real benefit to workstation customers.
The new design of the Precision T3600, along with the T5600 & T7600, allows for the removable power supply accessible from the outside – complete with a handle with an integrated LED to tell indicate the health of the power supply. Although you can just pull out the power supply without opening the system, this feature is also “lockable”. And the new design includes some relatively simple ideas based on customer usage – handles for example, to allow users to easily move around systems. And another design feature across the line – a very clean, organized system on the inside. It is very easy to add memory, change hard-drives, or swap graphics cards.
And along with the Precision T5600 and T7600, the T3600 has Dell's exclusive and patented Reliable Memory Technology which isolates memory errors, prevents the system from using bad memory and increases system reliability.
Dell's dual-socket work-horse, the T5600 supports one or two E5-2600 Intel Xeon CPUs and up to 128GB of main memory. The increased capability of this system is packed into the same compact chassis size as the T3600. As Don Maynard points out, from a workstation architecture viewpoint, this system is designed to make users more productive by getting more work done faster.
More CPU power and more memory are the big draws for the T5600. Like its sister systems, it supports USB 3.0 and PCI Express Generation 3 as well as Dell's patented Reliable Memory Technology.
This is the most expandable and most powerful workstation in the Dell Precision line for 2012. The basics : a dual-socket, Xeon-based, PCI Express Generation 3 workstation. Look at the difference between the T7500 and the T7600. More performance, more expandable, and easier to service – in a smaller, neatly-designed box. A chassis, by the way, that can be mounted in the server room using Dell's standard rails.
There is so much new in this workstation, that it is hard to know where to start. Thankfully, Dell provided a personal interview with CADplace to talk about the benefits of the new T7600, so please take a minute to watch the video. Don Maynard provides a great description of this machine.
On seeing the T7600, the first thing that is striking is the size. Dell went to great pains to make this system fit in the server-room. Check out the Dell description of this trend on CADplace. Making the chassis smaller, however, would be a death-knell for the T7600 if it were not powerful and expandable. The industrial design team did an exceptional job on this workstation, and this points to the second most striking feature of the system. The interior is divided into two compartments, one for storage & power, and one for processors and graphics. The result allows Dell to optimize for vastly different cooling requirements. A very smart design which allows this smaller chassis to support a 1300W power supply, 8 removable hard-drives, 512 GB of memory, 2 Xeon processors, and 3 of the largest graphics cards on the market.
That is impressive.
This system not only sports the pull-out removable power supply, but all of the hard-drives are also accessible from the outside – in fact from the front of the T7600. This makes servicing simple, but also accommodates customer requirements. This could include using different drives for unique projects, or removing and storing sensitive data in secure locations.
Of course the T7600 also uses the PCI Express Gen 3 solution and with the expandability of the new design, Dell allows for an extra 2 x16 graphic slots when the second CPU socket is populated. The result is that the T7600 can support 3 of the largest graphics cards on the market – a feature that Dell competitors do not have.
Well in the case of the all of the Precision workstations, there is all of the new “goodness” from Intel : the Ivy-Bridge platform is the basis of the new Precision T1650 and the latest generation Xeon E5 processors make of the core of the mainstream to high-end Precision workstations. PCI Express Gen 3 is inside the T3600, T5600, and T7600 providing an internal data autobahn at twice the speed of the previous generation. In addition, the memory and I/O is attached directly to the CPU to make the entire CPU – memory – I/O system extremely fast.