Supermicro 7047AX-TRF/72RF SuperWorkstation Preview

1. Introduction2. 2 Intel Xeon E5-2687W v23. SuperWorkstation Chassis4. High-Res Gallery5. Motherboard6. AMD FirePro W50007. Testing Methodology8. Maxon Cinebench R11.59. SPECviewperf 1110. Final Thoughts11. View All Pages

The Supermicro 7047AX-TRF/72RF SuperWorkstation is a big, powerful box, but it has a couple of serious flaws if purchased in its ‘raw' state.

There's no doubt that the new Ivy Bridge version 2 of the Xeon E5-2687W is a significant improvement over its predecessor. The Supermicro system shows the potential this has for multi-threaded tasks like rendering.

However, the choice of graphics does not match this power, unless modelling will be an insignificant part of your workflow. We really would expect a more powerful graphics card – at least an AMD FirePro W7000 or NVIDIA Quadro K4000 – to match the capabilities of the processor.

We would also expect a solid state disk for operating system and main applications, which is usually the norm in contemporary 3D content creation workstations. This would significantly reduce boot and application loading times.

Despite these omissions, the price of £5,999 plus VAT isn't overly expensive in the professional work space.

A similarly specified Dell Precision T7600 workstation would cost about the same, although we also checked prices with a local British vendor and found this to be around £300 less for a similar set of components.

If the SuperWorkstation has been supplied with better graphics and a solid state disk, to provide a more rounded performance in modelling as well as rendering, for the same price, it would have been an excellent system. But in its current form the specification seems unbalanced.

Pros

• Incredibly fast multi-threaded rendering
• RAM can be expanded to 1TB, with eight slots available
• Lots of hot-swap 3.5in drive bays
• Dual-redundant power supplies
• Passive CPU cooling cannot fail, good in a server room
• Professional level warranty

Cons

• Mid-range AMD FirePro W5000 graphics doesn't match processor specification
• No solid state disk for main operating system and applications
• Costs well over £5,000, but not supplied with any kind of RAID storage in situ
• Cheaper systems with similar specification are available
• Chassis seems unnecessarily heavy
• Styling seems old fashioned
• Noisy for a workstation that you're sitting next to all day.

In the final analysis,  it's clear to see where this system scores.

KitGuru Labs has never tested a system with a higher Cinebench 11.5 score, so if your application is CPU intensive, then the power of having two frequency enhanced Intel E5 2687W processors chewing through tons of  data together could make a powerful financial argument in favour of spending way over £5,000. In a commercial environment, this kind of system could be working almost non-stop, so even a 10-20% processing advantage could give your company the ability to do a lot more invoicing by the end of the year – easily paying for the increased spend on hardware.

Plus, the passive cooling and multiple redundancies built into things like the power supplies, means the chance of being forced into downtime for a repair is significantly reduced.

That brings us to the negatives. Aesthetics might not be as important as they would be in the consumer space, but with Apple's new Mac Pro looking a lot like Darth Vader's R2D2 unit, we believe that there will be more of a connection between how fast something looks and how much you're willing to pay for it.

The weight is uncomfortable and we can't see the advantage, given how many strong new materials there are on the market each year. With regard to noise, if it had been a ‘dedicated server' then we wouldn't have touched on this at all, but the graphics card and product name indicate that it would be near people – in which case we would like more attention paid to noise levels – especially since the CPUs are passively cooled.

The last of our comments relate to the basic specification being shipped. Given that the system is completely adaptable, maybe Supermicro is right not to pre-install lots of drives or go with a much higher end graphics card.

Western Digital produces a 2TB ‘Black' drive, targeted at the workstation market with a 5 year warranty and is available for just over £100 to the end user. Using a pair of these would have given the system basic data protection with almost no effect on the final price.

That leaves us with the graphics card. While the W5000 is capable, it doesn't shine in any benchmark. Checking online, we find the AMD FirePro W7000 is around £462 + VAT. In terms of cost to the manufacturer, the W7000 might be around £200 more than the W5000, but what do you get for your money?  Lining up the specifications, close to double on almost everything:-

But then we come down to the price. While the mainboard, graphics card and processors account for half the price, there is still a lot of money being asked for here without an obvious win for the customer.

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KitGuru says: While there is no denying the upgradeability of this platform, the basic spec provided simply doesn't make sense for any specific application. Adding the second hard drive, booting off an SSD and moving to an AMD FirePro W7000 – with the price closer to £5,995 – would have made for a much more balanced system. That said, the raw CPU processing power on offer here is unparalleled, making it a great choice for media houses that will customise before placing their order.

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