Boston's Venom 2306-7T is a high-performance
workstation featuring Intel's recently introduced Xeon E5-2600 v2
processor family, combined with Nvidia Kepler-based GPU accelerators and
high-speed storage options to boost the performance of demanding
applications.
Available now, the
Venom 2306-7T
is just one of Boston's line-up of workstation, server and storage
products that can be tailored for each specific customer's requirements.
But with the new Xeon processors, previously codenamed Ivy Bridge EP,
workstation users can benefit from greater performance thanks to more
cores, support for more memory capacity, and higher clock speeds.
While other PCs have gravitated towards more
consumer-friendly system designs such as small form factor or all-in-one
units, workstations have tended to remain large bulky tower boxes -
with the notable exception of
HP's Z1 system we reviewed last year - owing to the need to fit more drives and other specialised hardware than standard systems.
The Venom 2306-7T is no surprise here, shipping
in a mid-tower chassis that has room for four hot-swappable 3.5in drive
bays in addition to a 5.25in bay for an optical drive, if required. The
four hot-swappable bays are protected by a grille door in the casing,
which can be locked to prevent unauthorised removal of the drives.
Our review system was configured with a pair of
Xeon E5-2670 v2 chips,
which boast 10 CPU cores each and also support Intel's Hyper-Threading
technology, meaning the system is theoretically capable of processing up
to 40 simultaneous threads for applications that support this. While
clocked at 2.5GHz, the Xeon E5-2670 v2 can ramp up its cores to 3.3GHz
via Intel's Turbo Boost technology, providing there is thermal headroom
available.
On the storage side, Boston had filled all four
drive bays on our review system with two Intel 520 Series 180GB solid
state drives (SSDs) and two Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 3TB 7200RPM SATA
hard drives. The SSDs formed a Raid 1 array and were configured as the
system volume, while the hard drives were also paired up as a Raid 1
array to serve as a data volume.
Combined with its Nvidia Quadro K4000 graphics
card, the Venom is an ideal platform for users of graphically intensive
applications in areas such as medical research, oil and gas exploration,
defence and manufacturing, according to Boston. It is also relatively
quiet, generating little more than a gentle hum except at power-on, when
the fans give a roar as they momentarily spin up to full speed.
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