This Xeon-based red devil from Cryo is quite simply the most powerful workstation we’ve ever tested
Price:
£6,520 / $10,610 / €7,448
Manufacturer:
Cryo
Main features:
Pushing your workstation’s processor clock speed above the recommended level used to be one.
So the Octane has 24 virtual cores on offer, partnered with 24GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 memory; these are arranged as two banks of three modules each to take advantage of the Xeon processors’ triple- channel memory architecture.
To keep the heat under control, Cryo installed a custom water-cooling system and the chassis is bristling with fans.
It’s not a particularly noisy machine, though: the fans are quite large, so don’t rotate at a high frequency.
Cryo has taken a similarly high-end approach to the graphics acceleration, supplying an AMD FirePro V9800, which sports 1,600 stream processors and 4GB of frame buffer.
Although it’s been out for over a year now, this remains AMD’s flagship OpenGL card, with support for DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.1 and Shader a recipe for an invalidated warranty.
But over the last couple of years, the greater tolerance of CPU hardware has meant this kind of enhancement is now widely accepted – and indeed built into Intel’s processors via its Turbo Boost function. Now even dual-CPU workstations are gaining the benefit.
The Octane EDP-WS sports twin Intel Xeon X5690 CPUs that run at a nominal 3.46GHz, but Cryo has boosted them permanently to 4.5GHz.
The Xeons aren’t just running at a high clock speed, either. They both have six physical cores, and Intel’s Hyper- Threading technology subdivides these into two virtual cores for each physical one.
So the Octane has 24 virtual cores on offer, partnered with 24GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 memory; these are arranged as two banks of three modules each to take advantage of the Xeon processors’ triple- channel memory architecture.
To keep the heat under control, Cryo installed a custom water-cooling system and the chassis is bristling with fans. It’s not a particularly noisy machine, though: the fans are quite large, so don’t rotate at a high frequency.
Cryo has taken a similarly high-end approach to the graphics acceleration, supplying an AMD FirePro V9800, which sports 1,600 stream processors and 4GB of frame buffer.
Although it’s been out for over a year now, this remains AMD’s flagship OpenGL card, with support for DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.1 and Shader Model 5.
It also incorporates no fewer than six mini DisplayPort connections, with support for ATI’s EyeFinity, allowing truly whopping seamless monitor arrays, all with hardware OpenGL acceleration.
The main boot drive and repository for applications is a 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 solid-state disk, which offers rapid read and write performance.
Twin 2TB Seagate Barracuda XT mechanical 7,200rpm disks provide general data storage, while a Samsung SH-S233C 22x DVD rewriter takes care of removable storage.
The Octane was always going to be an ace at rendering, but even we weren’t expecting by how much.
The Cinebench R11.5 rendering score of 22.76 is 50 per cent higher than anything we’ve seen before, although the OpenGL score of 82.38 is only just quicker than Workstation Specialists’ WSX-6 (Reviews, 3D World 133).
We also ran SPECviewperf 11, which shows the strengths and weaknesses of the AMD graphics.
The lightwave-01 score of 67.47 is the highest we’ve ever recorded. The sw-02 score of 53.44 is only a fraction off the top slot, and results are generally impressive across the board.
Nvidia’s latest generation is ahead of the FirePro V9800 in some areas, though, notably the Maya-derived maya-03 and Pro/Engineer-basedproe-05.So,asa modelling workstation, the Cryo is best partnered with the graphics vendor most suitable for your chosen software.
Verdict
PROS
• Supremely quick rendering
• Plenty of OpenGL power
• Generous storage
• Three-year warranty
CONS
• Expensive
• AMD graphics aren’t optimal for some applications
The Cryo Octane EDP-WS comes with a hefty price, but it’s hard to put a cost on this level of performance
Posted on Thursday, September 22nd, 2011 at 2:32 pm under Hardware, Reviews. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: Cryo Octane, EDP-WS, review, workstation
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