Intel Xeon ‘Sapphire Rapids’ workstation round up

Our top picks of single socket Intel Xeon W-2400 / W-3400 Series and 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable workstations — desktop and rack

HP Z4, Z6, Z8 & Z8 Fury G5

HP has four ‘Sapphire Rapids’ workstations, the most out of all the major vendors. Like Lenovo, it is also looking to blur the boundaries between desktop and datacentre, introducing several features more commonly found in servers, with a view to minimising downtime and enhancing system management. This includes hot swappable M.2 SSDs, redundant PSUs and the HP Anyware Remote System Controller to help IT managers better manage workstation fleets – desktop, rack and hybrid. The HP Z4 G5 features Intel Xeon W-2400 Series (up to 24-cores), and up to two dual slot GPUs. The HP Z6 G5 features the Intel Xeon W-3400 Series from 12 to 36 cores (not including the flagship 56-core model) and three dual slot GPUs. The HP Z8 G5 features ‘Sapphire Rapids’ fourth generation Xeon Scalable processors, but only up to 32 cores, and two dual slot GPUs. The HP Z8 Fury G5 supports the whole range of Intel Xeon W-3400 Series CPUs (up to 56-cores) and up to four dual slot GPUs.

■ www.hp.com/zworkstations

Boxx Apexx W3 / W4 & Raxx W3

Boxx’s ‘Sapphire Rapids’ workstation family is split neatly into three machines: the desktop Xeon W-2400 Apexx W3, the desktop Xeon W-3400 Apexx W4 (which can also be rack mounted), and the dedicated 3U rack, the Raxx W3, which features liquid cooled Xeon W-3400 processors.

The Apexx W3 can host two double slot GPUs, up to the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation, while the Apexx W4 and Raxx W3 can have four.

■ boxx.com

Scan 3XS Render Pro X6

Scan uses its expertise as a custom workstation manufacturer to offer something different to most others. Its Intel Xeon W-3400 Series-based 3XS Render Pro X6 makes the GPU the star of the show. It packs six Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090s into a Corsair 1000D chassis to create a massively powerful desktop workstation for GPU rendering.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is a triple slot card out of the box, but Scan has stripped it down to single slot with a custom water cooler to keep thermals under control.

Scan also offers a more standard ‘Sapphire Rapids’ workstation. The 3XS Custom GWP 4677 features Intel Xeon W-2400 Series CPUs and dual GPUs up to the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation. ■ www.scan.co.uk/3xs

Dell Precision 5860 Tower , 7960 Tower & 7960 Rack

For its ‘Sapphire Rapids’ desktops, Dell has taken a different approach to HP and Lenovo. It has focused exclusively on Intel’s single socket workstation processors - the Xeon W-2400 (Precision 5860 Tower) and W-3400 (Precision 7960 Tower) - ignoring the server-focused 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable altogether. However, with these two machines, Dell should have most bases covered in design and engineering, especially with the Precision 7960 supporting 4 GPUs on top of its 56-cores. 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable still gets a look-in with the datacentre-focused dual socket Precision 7960 Rack. While on paper this 2U machine offers much greater user density compared to HP and Lenovo’s 4U / 5U offerings, it can only support up to two GPUs (whereas the Lenovo ThinkStation PX can support up to four), so those with more demanding GPU-centric workflows may lose out or have to use two machines instead of one, which will likely add to costs.

■ www.dell.com/precision

Workstation Specialists WS IXW-W7900 & WS IXW-W7901

UK firm Workstation Specialists offers two ‘Sapphire Rapids’ desktop workstations which differ largely by the number of GPUs they can support. The WS IXW-W7901 offers up to four double slot cards up to the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation, while the WS IXW-W7900 offers three.

Interestingly, on paper the WS IXW-W7901 should be able to do this with both Intel Xeon W-2400 and W-3400 Series processor options. This is in contrast to most workstation manufacturers who only offer four double slot GPUs with the more expensive Intel Xeon W-3400 Series processors.

So if your workflows are CPU light and GPU heavy, then configuring the WS IXW-W7901 with the entry-level Intel Xeon w3-2423, for example, could give you the power you need for GPU rendering without spending money on a high core count, high memory bandwidth CPU you don’t need. ■ www.workstationspecialist.com

With an Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation professional GPU and 64-core Threadripper Pro CPU, this monster desktop workstation packs a serious punch for the most demanding design viz workflows

For its latest high-performance workstation, Scan has combined two of the most powerful workstation-class processors out there — the 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX CPU and the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPU.

Coupled with 256 GB of DDR4 memory and an ultra-fast 8TB SSD RAID 0 array, this machine will likely be the envy of most design viz artists.

Given that the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation is fresh off the production line (read our review on page WS24), it is arguably the silicon star of this workstation. With 48 GB of GDDR6 memory, the ultra-high-end GPU is well equipped to handle the most demanding viz datasets, both in real time 3D and ray tracing / path tracing.

It absolutely obliterated many of the benchmark records set by its predecessor, the Nvidia RTX A6000 (48 GB) (read our review www.tinyurl.com/D3DRTXA6000). The biggest gains were seen in GPU ray tracing where the third generation RT cores really come into their own, outperforming the Ampere Generation GPU by a factor of 1.93, 2.05, and 2.19 respectively in the V-Ray, KeyShot, and blender benchmarks. This is a phenomenal generation on generation increase.

It’s no slouch in real time 3D either. In Unreal Engine 4.26 we saw frame rates with our Audi Car Configurator model increase by 1.50 and 1.41 times respectively with ray tracing enabled and disabled. The performance increase rose to 1.63 in arch viz tool Enscape 3.1, and also 1.63 in high-end automotive viz software Autodesk VRED Professional 2023.

Product spec

an automatic improvement in 3D frame rates either, as most real time viz tools are not multiGPU aware.

With so much processing power available through the GPU, it’s easy to forget there’s also a monster Threadripper Pro 5995WX CPU at your disposal. Rendering is an obvious beneficiary of the 64-core CPU but that’s also a job that the RTX 6000 Ada Generation does exceptional well.

To boost performance further, the Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T can take a second RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPU, but at £7,149 (Ex VAT) per card, you’ll need seriously deep pockets. This should cut ray trace render times significantly (by up to half), but you won’t get a 96 GB pool of memory to play with like you would with two Nvidia RTX A6000s. Nvidia has dropped support for NVlink. Don’t expect

Viz users often have well defined rendering pipelines that focus on either CPU or GPU and not necessarily both. That’s not always the case, of course. While V-Ray has entirely different render engines for GPU and CPU and users tend to stick to one, Solidworks Visualize can use both concurrently, and KeyShot allows you to easily swap between GPU and CPU as and when required. This could be to help free up compute resources in order to focus on other workflows, such as real time 3D, video editing or video encoding. Unreal Engine also has different compute-intensive processes that run on CPU and GPU.

CPU rendering also has the benefit of being able to work with incredibly large datasets and with 256 GB of system memory (8 x 32 GB Samsung ECC Registered DDR4 3200MHz) the Scan workstation is certainly well equipped.

With a default TDP of 280W, the Threadripper Pro 5995WX is one of the more challenging CPUs to cool. Scan uses a 360mm Corsair H150i Elite Cappelix RGB hydrocooler mounted in the Fractal Design Meshify 2 case and has replaced the fans with more efficient Noctua models.

This gives enough thermal headroom to increase all core frequencies above the base 2.70 GHz, peaking at 3.05 GHz in both Cinebench and KeyShot 2023.

It’s not the best Threadripper Pro implementation we’ve seen. The Armari Magnetar M64TPRW1300G3 (read our review in DEVELOP3D’s December / January 2023 Workstation Special Report), with its custom All-in-One (AIO) cooler, manages to hit 3.38 GHz in Cinebench and 3.45 GHz in KeyShot, outperforming the Scan machine by a factor of 1.05 in Cinebench and KeyShot and even more in V-Ray (1.1).

Both processors pump out some serious heat and that’s hardly surprising considering how much power they draw. When rendering in Cinebench (CPU) we recorded 474W at the socket, 550W with V-Ray GPU, and a whopping 740W when using both processors in Solidworks Visualize. The machine was fairly noisy when CPU rendering, less so when GPU rendering.

The chassis is Scan’s trademark Fractal

Design Meshify 2 with 3XS custom front panel. It’s a little on the large side (542 x 240 x 474 mm), but is solid and well-built and has a ready supply of ports. Up front and top, there are two USB 3.2 Type A and one USB 3.2 Type C, with plenty more at the rear (eight USB Type-A and two USB 3.2 Type C). For networking there two superfast 10GbE NICs and WiFi 6 built in.

The Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T has some other tricks up its sleeve. While the 2TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD system drive is standard fare for workstations these days, the project drive certainly is not.

The ultra-fast 8TB RAID 0 array is built using four 2TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs mounted on an ASUS Hyper M.2 PCIe add-in card, and delivers phenomenal sequential read / write speeds. In CrystalDiskMark we recorded 24.6 GB/s read and 24.8 GB/s write, compared to 7.4 GB/s and 6.8 GB/s on a single 2TB Samsung 990 Pro.

This all sounds great on paper, but the reality is there are only certain workflows that will benefit from such fast storage and only in certain conditions. This includes engineering simulation (with gigantic datasets that don’t fit entirely into system memory), or video editing (with colossal, super high-resolution files). There may be more, and we’d love to learn what they are.

We did see a small benefit over a single SSD when copying files. A zipped file containing 90 GB of point cloud scan data delivered the biggest speed up, with