System Builder Marathon Q1 2016: $1275 Professional Workstation

Overclocking, Testing & Analysis

Overclocking

Since quite a few professional users usually prefer stability, over the ability to gain a small boost in speed, overclocking options with professional hardware are usually very limited, if they exist at all. Since the bios on my C236 WSI motherboard is extremely lacking in features I won’t be getting to overclock my CPU or RAM for this build, which leaves me with just the graphics card.

After messing around with the settings in MSI Afterburner, I was able to gain access to some of the W5100’s settings. Still, since I wasn’t allowed to raise the temperature limit setting, I was only able to get a +100MHz core overclock and a +50MHz memory overclock before the card hit its 70C temperature ceiling and throttled back.

A quick look at CPU-Z confirms that my RAM was indeed forced to run at the motherboards slower speed of 2133MHz, although it did shave one clock cycle off the stock 16-16-16-39 timings. [Without XMP it reverts to the JEDEC standard-Ed.]

Component Settings

Synthetics

I’m not sure if it’s because we haven’t updated our version of 3DMark in several years or because the drivers for the W5100 aren’t optimized for this type of workload, but this quarter’s build fell flat on its face during the GPU intensive part of 3DMark’s tests. All of the other numbers look good though, and aside from some slightly lower numbers in the rest of the graphics benchmarks, my quad-core Xeon holds strong against the previous builds in the CPU benchmarks.

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Gaming

Here’s where things turn ugly for this quarter’s build. It quickly becomes apparent that using a workstation card for gaming is a really terrible idea. In fact, it’s so bad that I’m convinced that my GTX 650m equipped laptop from 2012 could wipe the floor with this build in the gaming section. Still, the entire point of this build was to get hard performance numbers for this kind of hardware, which is exactly what we got. Hopefully it won’t be as bad as it looks later on in the performance-value chart.

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Applications

The stock 4GHz clock speed of my Xeon gives me a little bit of an advantage over last quarter’s Prosumer build, but only at stock settings. It would have been nice to see what I could have pulled off with a CPU overclock, but that’s just not going to happen today.  Similarly, the W5100 gives me the upper hand in some of the OpenCL workloads, though not in as many of them as I would have liked.

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Power, Heat & Efficiency

Thanks to the low power draw of the W5100, even at full CPU and GPU load I managed to use less than 50 percent of the EA-380D’s rated power output. That low power draw also helps to keep the GPU temperatures low, although the mediocre performance of the stock CPU cooler does offset some of that benefit.

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Overlooking the beat down I took in the gaming benchmarks, the rest of the performance numbers look pretty strong, though honestly for the money I spent, they could have been better. Still, my far below average power draw allows me to shoot past the other builds when it comes to efficiency.

The noise numbers aren’t that bad either considering that I’m using a stock CPU cooler, a GPU with a very small fan and a case with a wide-open side panel.

Value

Despite all the money I spent and my rig’s mediocre performance, I somehow managed to come in second place, but only at stock performance levels. However, had I been able to overclock my CPU, I bet I would have been able to solidify my second place standing in overclocked performance as well.

I gain a slight value boost when the OS is taken out of the equation, but it’s not a big enough change to make any difference.

Getting rid of the $65 I spent on non-platform components also isn’t enough to significantly change anything.

As expected, I’ve come in dead last when it comes to high gaming resolutions, but that’s not exactly as bad as it sounds. This build was never intended to be used for gaming, so its performance in that aspect isn’t surprising. Overall, even with my part changes, I mostly accomplished what I set out to do, which was to get hard data on how true professional components perform in our benchmarks. I’ve even learned a couple of things in the process.

The first of which is that we could really use some additional “professional” application benchmarks, i.e. CAD and other GPU intensive applications, so that we can get more meaningful data in situations like this one and also to help further quantify GPU performance in general. We’ve got a few applications in our benchmarks now that put our GPU choices to the test, but they simply scratch the surface rather than give us any true understanding of how well certain GPUs work with professional applications.

The second thing, which ended up being more of a demonstration than a learning experience for me, was that using workstation-grade hardware outside of a limited set of applications is mostly a waste of time and money. Unless you use a specific set of programs or need to be very precise with your data, you’re better off choosing consumer grade hardware.

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Chris Miconi is an Associate Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware, covering Cases.

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