High-End Workstation
Five builds were in the running for this quarter's High-End Workstation BestConfig.
When the polls closed, guchaochen’s Build prevailed with 28 percent of the vote.
Congratulations to forum member guchaochen for having his recommended build picked by the Tom's Hardware community this quarter!
Sporting a pair of Ivy Bridge-EP-based Intel Xeon E5-2620s (rather than a single high-end Core i7 used last quarter), guchaochen designed one serious workstation.
Dynatron R24 CPU coolers were leveraged to keep these beastly processors cool.
Obviously, a dual-slot mobo was in order, and Supermicro had just the ticket with its MBD-X9DR3-F-O. A massive compliment of 32GB ECC-capable reistered DDR3-1600 fills the board's memory slots.
Guchoachen opted for a single Nvidia Quadro K4000, a rather stark contrast to burritobob’s trio of AMD FirePro V7900s in CrossFire.
Powering all of these high-end workstation parts is the very same PSU that burritobob chose for last quarter’s build: the 1000W 80 PLUS Gold-certified Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold.
The massive 960GB Crucial M500 SSD acts as this rig’s system drive, while a pair of 3TB Seagate Barracudas pack a combined 6TB of storage space.
Rather than attempt to out-do the bling factor of burritobob’s Cooler Master Storm Stryker, guchaochen went in the opposite direction. Lian-Li’s PC-A75 full tower ATX chassis is clean, classy and elegant. This black monolith doesn’t scream gamer; it confidently states professional.
While last quarter’s High-End Workstation was clearly geared toward the 3D graphics professional, guchaochen took another route, as his next few components illustrate. Creative Labs' Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD is a far cry from your average on-board audio.
In order to start churning out those master copies, guchaochen chose two Pioneer Blu-ray writers.
Guchaochen’s High-End Workstation carried a sticker price of $3997.75 when it was originally configured. The current prices of guchaochen’s build can be found in the BestConfigs shopping tables.
And that brings our Q4 2013 BestConfigs to a close, see you next year!
