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Formal testing procedure for this system sparked some interesting debate at KitGuru Labs. Unlike a system that you might pick up in the high street, each and every customer will have a unique set of requirements – as well as the budget necessary to get that customisation.
For example, the set up and hardware for high-frequency trading will be different from image processing/rendering software that runs on the CPU and packages that are GPU aware.
We ran a selection of professional 3D-oriented benchmarks on the Supermicro. To test raw rendering ability we called upon Maxon Cinebench R11.5, which is based on Maxon's increasingly popular Cinema 4D modelling and animation software. The render test is fully multi-threaded and so will show the potential benefit of a multi-core system. Cinebench R11.5 also includes an OpenGL preview, which illustrates how smooth the modelling experience will be. Unlike the render test, the OpenGL test is primarily influenced by the performance of the graphics hardware.
In order to test the graphics capabilities still further, we also ran the SPECviewperf 11 OpenGL test. This performs a series of eight benchmarks based on a selection of the leading 3D content creation CAD/CAM and engineering applications.
The catia-03 test is based on the CATIA V5 R19 and V9 R2009 CAD application from Dassault Systems, whilst ensight-04 is based on CEI's EnSight 8.2 CAD, FEA and CFD application. The 3D content creation tests include lightwave-01, based on NewTek's Lightwave 9.6, and maya-03, based on Autodesk Maya 2009.
For engineering and design, there is proe-05 based on Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 from PTC, sw-03 based on SolidWorks 2009 SP2 from Dassault Systemes, tcvis-02 based on the Siemens Teamcenter Visualization Mockup and snx-01 based on Siemens NX7. So this represents a broad range of professional 3D applications.
Changes to the storage and graphics sub-systems can affect certain benchmarks in a big way, but these numbers will give you a strong idea on relative performance.
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.