KitGuru Complete Guide to PC Workstations – Part 2

As we explained in our introduction to this series, workstations are considerably more than just powerful PCs. Brute performance may be the basis of a system you intend to use for high-end desktop computing tasks like 3D animation, CAD/CAM, engineering and product design. But there is much more to a workstation than a high-end rig aimed at general work usage or gaming. There are many more variations within the Intel Xeon processor range than Core i7, and whilst the professional graphics cards have a family relationship with their consumer counterparts, the specification of these and driver accreditation make them very different beasts, too.

Read PART 1 first – over HERE.

Over the course of this new series, KitGuru will be guiding you through exactly what to look for in a workstation, depending on the kind of work you would like to perform. We will be using a gruelling suite of benchmarks to separate the wheat from the chaff, and running all of them on three different workstation specifications using three different Intel processors, with four different NVIDIA Quadro professional 3D accelerators.

All of the workstations and cards were kindly supplied by Wakefield-based PC Specialist. In this first article, we introduce the three specifications in detail and provide some initial test results with the Maxon Cinebench R15 benchmark.

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