Workstation Specialists WS-X1100 (with 2x NVIDIA Quadro GP100) Review

Rating: 9.0.

AMD has been using High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) since the Fiji GPU in 2014. But NVIDIA has stuck with GDDR5 for everything but its General Purpose GPU-oriented Tesla P100. With the launch of the monstrous Quadro GP100, HBM has arrived in the graphics-oriented Quadro range as well. Our first taste of this humongous £7K card comes inside a suitably powerful system from Workstation Specialists, the WS-X1100. And this boasts not one GP100, but two.

In fact, this system has another graphics card – a Quadro P2000. This is included so you can use the two GP100s purely as GPU-based rendering co-processors, leaving the P2000 for mere graphics acceleration. Essentially, this is a system aimed at General Purpose GPU (GPGPU), where CUDA- or OpenCL-enabled software takes advantage of the huge parallel-processing power of modern graphics cards for highly multi-threaded tasks like film 3D rendering or cryptocurrency mining.

The WS-X1100 workstation is no slouch in its own right either. It's based around an Intel Core i7 6800K processor, with 64GB of DDR4 SDRAM. However, the two GP100s push the overall cost of this system up considerably, to a whopping near-£18K inc VAT price, around that of a new VW Golf (we checked). Obviously, this isn't going to be your next top-end gaming rig. So let's find out what you get for the price of a brand new premium hatchback.

Workstation Specialists WS-X1100 Specifications:

• Intel Core i7 6800K @4.2GHz
• Corsair Hydro Series H100 Water Cooling
• 64GB DDR4 SDRAM @ 3,000MHz
• ASUS X99-E WS Motherboard
• 250GB Samsung EVO M.2 NVMe PCI Express SSD
• 2 x 16GB GDDR5 NVIDIA Quadro GP100 Graphics
• 5GB GDDR5 NVIDIA Quadro P2000 Graphics
• 1200W Platinum Efficiency PSU
• Corsair Carbide 400Q Chassis
• Windows 10 Professional 64-bit
• 3 Years Warranty Parts and Labour NBD

Price: £17,976.78 inc VAT (Buy from Workstation Specialists HERE)

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