WS-X1100S

WS-X1100S (with Nvidia Quadro P5000)

Don’t be fooled by the tiny chassis. This machine packs a colossal punch, rivalling workstation towers for demanding design viz and VR applications.

Small Form Factor (SFF) workstations from the Tier One manufacturers (Dell, HP, Lenovo and Fujitsu) haven’t changed that much over the years. Yes, there have been significant advances in pro graphics and faster, smaller storage, but they have remained laser-focused on mainstream 3D CAD.

Meanwhile, specialist workstation manufacturers have aimed higher, differentiating themselves by producing diminutive machines with serious power inside. With overclocked CPUs and ultra highend pro graphics, you get raw performance to rival the meanest of towers, without the bulky chassis.

The WS-X1100S from Derby-based Workstation Specialists is arguably the most flexible SFF workstation we have ever seen. It can take any pro GPU, up to the ultra high-end Nvidia Quadro P6000 and, importantly, all manner of Intel Core i7 CPUs, including the 10-core Extreme Edition Intel Core i7 6950X.

Storage is also flexible, with support for one on-board M.2 NVMe SSD and either four 2.5-inch drives or one 3.5-inch HDD and two 2.5-inch drives. You can even remove the optical drive to fit an additional 2.5-inch drive.

The WS-X1100S’s Achilles heel is memory. With only two DIMM slots and 16GB DDR4 modules, this means a maximum of 32GB. This shouldn’t trouble your average designer, architect or engineer, but for those who take their design viz seriously – particularly when multiple applications are involved – it could be a deal breaker. The WX-X1100S’s matt black chassis is nicely styled Product spec many dual Xeon workstations. Indeed, in KeyShot, it was only and well-proportioned, in ■ Intel Core i7 6950X 35% slower than a dual Xeon contrast to the slender form factor of a Tier One SFF workstation. With no fiddly screws (clocked to 4.2GHz) (10 Cores) CPU ■ 32GB (2x 16GB) 2666MHz DDR4 E5-2650 v4 workstation (2.20GHz up to 2.90GHz), which has a total of 24 cores to contend with, the top, left Memory and 48 threads. and right metal panels come ■ 512GB Samsung SM951 M.2 NVMe SSD However, it’s in singleoff very easily, but this is + 2TB 3.5-inch 7,200 threaded or lightly threaded where the stress-free servicRPM HDD applications that the Core i7 ing ends. With so much tech■ Nvidia Quadro P5000 (16GB 6950X excels. In our Delcam nology packed into a small GDDR5X) GPU PowerMill test, which scales space, you’ll need very nimble ■ Microsoft Windows well over 2 to 3 cores, it would fingers and lots of patience to 10 Pro 64-Bit likely leave any dual Xeon upgrade or replace many of ■ 250(h) x 160(w) x 338mm (d) standing, even when running the components. ■ 36 months three toolpath calculations at External ports are plentiful, however, with two USB standard hardware warranty with next business day the same time. 3.0 at the front and four at the engineer response Interactive graphics rear, alongside two USB 3.1. ■ £4,916 + VAT There’s a whole lot more to the WiFi is also integrated, workstation specialists.com WS-X1100S than incredible which could be particularly CPU power. The new Pascalrelevant to those who want to based Nvidia Quadro P5000 is a move the machine from room to room, or phenomenal GPU, ideal for high-end design from site to site (the small chassis makes viz, VR and GPU rendering. it very portable). In Autodesk VRED, it easily handled

Packing a 600W PSU, 140W CPU and everything we threw at it. Our complex 180W GPU into such a tiny chassis should automotive test model could be rotated be asking for trouble, but our test smoothly, even when anti-aliasing was set machine’s acoustics were superb, thanks to to ultra-high. To put this in context a water-cooled CPU and a number of low- (adjusting some benchmark scores taken duty fans. When idle, it gives off gentle from a lower GHz test machine), we hum, but this only got marginally louder expect it would produce more than 1.5 when running the CPU flat-out on a ray times the frame rate of the Quadro trace render. Adding a GPU render to the M5000, the GPU that the Quadro P5000 workload and running it for a good replaces. 30mins increased noise levels a bit, but it Performance in our VR benchmarks was still perfectly acceptable. was equally impressive, delivering 240 Frames Per Second (FPS) and 46 FPS Hardcore processing respectively in VRMark’s Orange and With a 10-core Intel Core i7 6950X CPU, Blue Rooms. For comparison, the Quadro our test machine was literally crying out M5000 only achieved 141 and 25 FPS, for some heavy-duty calculations. So, although this was in a workstation with with stopwatch in hand, we obliged. It the significantly slower CPU (3.2GHz made very light work of ray trace render- Intel Xeon E5-1680 v3). Regardless of this ing in both Autodesk 3ds Max Design and mismatch, the WS-X1100S should prove Luxion KeyShot. to be excellent machine for demanding

With 10 cores, 20 threads and a phe- pro VR applications. nomenal clock speed of 4.2GHz, this over- Interactive 3D performance in clocked CPU offers performance to rival SolidWorks 2015 CAD software was less

1 2

2 3

impressive. While we wouldn’t expect the WS-X1100S to set any records when viewing models in shaded and edges mode (as this view state is very CPU-limited and makes little use of the vast GPU resources) we did think it would perform better with RealView and Ambient Occlusion enabled. As it stood, it was actually slower than a Quadro M5000. However, as the Quadro P5000 is so new, and the first professional GPU to be based on the Pascal architecture, this will likely change.

GPU compute The Quadro P5000 is not just about interactive graphics. With up to 8.9 TFLOPS of single precision performance and 16GB GDDR5X memory, it has plenty of power for compute-intensive processes such as ray trace rendering.

Here, the obvious test application would have been SolidWorks Visualize, as it is built around Nvidia’s physically-based renderer Iray. However, SolidWorks Visualize will not support the Quadro P5000 until the 2017 SP1, which was not available at time of testing (it simply does not recognise the GPU), so we were forced to explore other options.

We loaded up AMD Radeon ProRender for SolidWorks, a competitor to Nvidia Iray, which runs on GPUs and CPUs.

Radeon ProRender may be optimised for AMD Radeon Pro GPUs, but the Nvidia Quadro P5000 cut through our test models faster than any other any GPU we have seen before, including the AMD Radeon Pro WX7100, as reviewed in the Nov / Dec 2016 edition.

We were also keen to try out ‘Pascal’s’ new Async Compute/Dynamic Load Balancing technology which is designed to handle mixed graphics and compute workloads better than before.

With Kepler and Maxwell Quadro GPUs, if the GPU was crunching its way through a render, it would often be very hard to position your 3D CAD model quickly and accurately, as it would jump about on screen. As a result, Nvidia used to recommend a multi GPU setup – one GPU dedicated to interactive graphics and another dedicated to compute.

This was certainly great for sales of

GPUs but (software compatibility permitting) it did mean Nvidia couldn’t compete with AMD on price (whose FirePro and Radeon Pro GPUs are very adept at handling graphics and compute tasks concurrently, making a single GPU solution viable).

As the WS-X1100S only has room for one GPU, this would have been a limitation in the past but, with Pascal, things appear to have improved dramatically.

On test, with AMD Radeon ProRender running in the background on the Quadro P5000, it was still possible to rotate models smoothly in SolidWorks. Occasionally, there was a small pause before the model responded to the movements of the mouse, but nothing that really impacted modelling productivity.

As SolidWorks is not a particularly GPU-intensive application, we also tested with Autodesk VRED, which uses 100% of the GPU’s resources 6 when spinning models. When running the GPU renderer in the background, frame rates dropped significantly, but we still found that models were very navigable. This would not have been the case with a single Quadro M5000.

Conclusion We were hugely impressed with Workstation Specialists’ take on the SFF workstation. Not only has the company managed to deliver exceptional 3D graphics performance thanks to the impressive Quadro P5000, but it has also backed it up with a hugely powerful CPU that excels in both single-threaded and multi-threaded workflows. This well-built machine may be tiny but it packs a colossal punch. As you might expect, there are some downsides. One is the 32GB memory limit, which will be a turn-off for some users. The other is the price.

At £4,916 our review machine might seem expensive – particularly alongside other SFF machines such as the HP Z240 SFF or Dell Precision 3420 – but the WS-X1100S is an entirely different beast. Tweaks to the specs can be made. Reducing the GPU to a Quadro M4000 and the CPU to an eight-core Intel Core i7 6900-K will knock off around £1,800. The good news is, it’s completely flexible.

Greg Corke

5

1 Liquid cooling and low-duty fans keep the machine running cool and quiet 2 Nvidia Quadro ‘Pascal’ GPUs deliver exceptional performance for VR, interactive design viz and physically-based rendering 3 The Workstation Specialists WS-X1100S is VR Ready 4 Rear of the chassis 5 Tiny chassis with a Coke can for scale 6 The WS-X1100S with side panel removed