Scan 3XS Ultimate 3D

Scan 3XS Ultimate 3D (with Nvidia Quadro P6000)

It offers incredible performance for rendering, VR and real-time viz, at a very competitive price, but the sheer size of this tower might be a turn-off for some.

Scan is renowned for its low-cost, overclocked 3D CAD workstations. But this new machine from the Bolton-based manufacturer is a different beast altogether.

The Scan 3XS Ultimate 3D is a dual Xeon graphics workstation for those who take their design visualisation or Virtual Reality (VR) very seriously. It’s incredibly powerful, but the biggest workstation we have ever reviewed. With the Fractal Design Define XL R2 chassis measuring 232mm (w) x 559mm (h) x 560mm (d), this is definitely one to keep under your desk.

As you might expect, the price tag is also substantial, coming in at £9,583 + VAT. This might sound like a lot but it is significantly less than what you’d pay for an equivalent machine from a Tier One manufacturer, such as Dell or HP.

The bulk of the budget goes on processors – a pair of Intel ‘Broadwell’ Xeon E5-2687W v4 CPUs and one ultra-highend Nvidia Quadro ‘Pascal’ P6000 GPU.

The Xeon E5-2687W v4 is a special 160W workstation CPU which offers designers the best of both worlds – high frequency (3.0GHz up to 3.5GHz) for general application performance and lots of cores (12) to make light work of multithreaded calculations. It pretty much hits the sweet spot for most desktop viz workflows. While ray trace rendering performance would likely be Product spec LIVE and Enscape. The Quadro P6000 handled everysome way behind the 22 core ■ 2 x Intel Xeon thing we threw at it and there Intel Xeon E5-2699 v4, our pair of Intel Xeon E5-2687W E5 2687W v4 CPU (12 cores) (3.0GHz, 3.5GHz Turbo) was no hint of it dropping below the critical 90 FPS v4 CPUs were certainly no ■ 128GB (8 x 16GB) threshold needed for a comfortslouches when number Samsung ECC Registered DDR4 able VR experience. crunching through our 2400MHz memory In contrast, performance in benchmarks. The 3XS ■ 256GB Intel 600p 3D CAD tool SolidWorks was Ultimate 3D is the first NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD + 2TB Seagate quite underwhelming. While machine to break the one- Barracuda HDD we didn’t expect the Quadro minute barrier in our 3ds ■ Nvidia Quadro P6000 to show any benefit Max rendering test. It also set P6000 (24GB GDDR5X) GPU over the Quadro M2000 when a record in Luxion KeyShot, ■ Microsoft Windows viewing models in shaded with completing our motorbike 10 Pro 64-Bit edges mode (as this viewing scene in 152 seconds. The beauty of the 3XS Ultimate is it does all of this ■ 232 (w) x 559 (h) x 560mm (d) ■ 3 Years – 1st Year Onsite, 2nd and 3rd mode is very CPU-limited), we did expect the P6000 to pull away when RealView, shadows without breaking a sweat. In Year RTB (Parts and Labour) and Ambient Occlusion were fact, thanks to its capacious ■ £9,583 + VAT turned on. But, to our surprise, noise-absorbing chassis and a pair of Corsair H80i hydroscan.co.uk/3xs this lead never materialised. In saying that, it should offer percoolers, the machine has very fectly acceptable performance good acoustics, even when rendering for in all 3D CAD applications. several hours – although fan noise is still Putting the Quadro P6000 to work quite noticeable when idle. inside GPU-accelerated physically based

The Intel Xeon E5-2687W v4 CPUs renderer, SolidWorks Visualize, told a difmight contribute to just over a third of the ferent story. The Quadro P6000 prooverall system cost, but it’s the 24GB duced a 100-pass FHD render in an Nvidia Quadro P6000 that really piles on incredible 21 secs and, even with 500 the pounds. At £4,426 + VAT, this Pascal- passes, the render completed in 84 secs. based dual height GPU is for the most By getting results back so quick, this demanding design visualisation and VR machine has the potential to change the workflows. way designers think about using physi-

Performance was exceptional in cally based rendering in their design Autodesk VRED Professional. Our auto- workflows. motive test model hit 100 frames per sec- Importantly, using your GPU for renond (FPS) at FHD resolution with Anti- dering doesn’t have to interrupt your 3D Aliasing disabled. Notably, even when modelling workflow. Even when renderAA was set to ultra-high, it maintained 25 ing flat out in SolidWorks Visualize, we FPS, which is perfectly smooth to all but were still able to smoothly pan, zoom and the most discerning eyes. rotate models in LumenRT, albeit at a

We had a similarly smooth experience reduced frame rate. This ‘multi tasking’ in ‘game engine’ architectural design viz capability is down to ‘Pascal’s’ Async tool LumenRT, with the Quadro P6000 Compute/Dynamic load balancing techdelivering anywhere from two to four nology, which is designed to more effitimes the performance of the Quadro ciently share GPU resources between M2000 (a popular 3D CAD GPU) with graphics and compute tasks. With its preour GPU-limited test models. decessor, the ‘Maxwell’-based Quadro

For Virtual Reality, the Quadro P6000 M6000, 3D models in LumenRT would clocked in around 40% quicker than likely have stuttered. Nvidia’s other Pascal-based Quadro, the With 128GB of DDR4 ECC memory, our Quadro P5000, delivering a VRMark test machine is well equipped to handle ‘Blue Room’ score of 65 FPS. This may be extremely complex design viz datasets. Of well off the target 109 FPS for smooth VR, course, the 3XS Ultimate 3D can be tuned, but let’s not forget that this demanding as required, from 64GB all the way up to benchmark is designed to test against 512GB. future-generation HMDs, rendering an For a machine of this stature, the storage extremely complex scene at a breathtak- feels a little pedestrian – specifically, the ing 5,012 × 2,880 (5K) resolution. choice of the 256GB Intel 600p NVMe SSD

Of course, the proof of the pudding is in (1,570MB/s read, 540MB/s write, 112K the eating, so we put on an HTC Vive and IOPS) as the primary drive. An additional tested the machine with two demanding £13 would get you the 256GB Samsung architectural VR applications, Autodesk SM961, which, with up to 3,100MB/s read,

1400MB/s write and 330K IOPS, boasts more than double the performance of the Intel drive. This could make a big difference when handling large design viz datasets or video. Capacity can also be increased with several different M.2 NVMe options available, all the way up to the 2TB Samsung 960 Pro.

With only one M.2 slot on the Asus Z10PE-D16 WS motherboard, it’s not possible to add a second M.2 NVMe drive. However, if high-performance storage is important, Scan offers optional Intel 750 PCI-E NVMe SSD add in cards, in capacities of 400GB or 1.2TB.

With eight 3.5-inch drive bays, and only one taken by a 2TB Seagate Barracuda Hard Disk Drive (HDD), there’s plenty of scope to boost storage capacity with a host of 2.5-inch SATA SSDs (up to 1TB) and 3.5-inch HDDs (up to 6TB).

Conclusion It’s hard not to fall for the Scan 3XS Ultimate 3D, simply because of the sheer power it possesses. From stunning 3D performance (in or out of VR) and plenty of muscle for both CPU and GPU rendering, this giant tower workstation can accelerate all design viz workflows.

The machine is well built and quiet – the liquid cooling and insulated chassis a big plus. The downside is size, which is significantly larger than comparative machines from the likes of Dell, HP and Lenovo. But this could be a small cross to bear considering it’s significantly cheaper.

In summary, if you’re pushing the boundaries of design viz and need a wellbalanced machine for CPU and GPU centric workflows, then the 3XS Ultimate 3D is well worth a look. Those on tighter budgets might consider downgrading to the Quadro P5000. It might not hit the heights of the flagship P6000, but it’s still an excellent GPU for viz and VR and will bring the cost down to £6,756 + VAT.

Greg Corke

1 The Fractal Design chassis is well over 0.5m tall 2 The CPUs are liquid-cooled to help keep fan noise down 3 Nvidia Quadro P6000 GPU 4 Eight drive bays for 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch SATA drives 5 1000W PSU 6 The machine can house one on-board M.2 NVMe SSD

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