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At KitGuru we are used to analysing the very first products in each new line-up. By and large, they come into the KitGuru Lab in the same way that they would off the shelf when one of our readers makes a purchase later. Today we have a very unusual first look at a product. It has been finalised, but there's no way to know how it will be configured for a customer – as SuperMicro can customise almost every aspect of a server.
A few years ago, the consumer and workstation ranges from Intel were released at similar times, as they were based on variants of the same core architecture. While the Core and Xeon ranges do still benefit from parallel core developments, the release dates are now far apart.
As a result, the Xeon processors based on Intel's Ivy Bridge architecture are only just arriving, whilst the mobile and desktop platforms have been transitioning over to Intel's Haswell for a few months now.
Our first taste of the new Ivy Bridge workstation and server processor comes from one of the heavyweights of server and workstation hardware – Supermicro. As a manufacturer of both motherboards and chassis, Supermicro is in a position to provide a more integrated solution than some of its competitors, at least in theory.
The Supermicro 7047AX-TRF/72RF SuperWorkstation comes in a chassis that can be deployed either as a pedestal tower, or as a 4U rack mounted unit, which could be handy if you plan on using a bunch of them in a render farm, or need a transportable system built into a cabinet flight case. However, the processors inside this chassis are the main stars of the show.
.System Specification
– Case: Supermicro CSE-747TG-R1K28B-SQ 4U rack mountable tower.
– Power Supply: 1280W Redundant High-efficiency Digital Power Supplies w/ PMBus 1.2.
– CPU: Dual Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2687W v2 3.40GHz @ 3.536GHz Ivy Bridge-EP CPUs.
– Motherboard: Super X9DAX-iF (Socket R LGA 2011) Motherboard.
– Cooler: Passive.
– RAM: 64GB DDR3 1600MHz ECC REG RoHS (8x 8GB).
– Hard Drive: 2TB Western Digital 7,200rpm hard disk.
– Graphics Card: AMD FirePro W5000 2048MB Graphics Card.
– Sound: Stereo.
– Optical Drive: 24x DVD+/-RW SATA Drive.
Our business has several of these systems and they have been generally well performed. I am not so sure about their technical support side as they seem to be a little disorganised, but its probably not a discussion for a public billboard.
Still good, system, but I agree, a GPU upgrade is in order for this one. no SSD is another glaring ommission.