Supermicro 7047AX-TRF/72RF SuperWorkstation Preview

The results with SPECviewperf 11 aren't quite so favourable as with Maxon Cinebench in this configuration.

We didn't have a comparable system in our database that used a graphics set-up comparable with the AMD FirePro W5000, so we created a single-processor workstation based around an Intel Core i7-3930K. This is rated at 3.2GHz stright out of the box, but in this case had been permanently increased to 4.3GHz. This workstation was using NVIDIA Quadro K2000 graphics, which is very similarly priced to the AMD FirePro W5000 (in fact, around £20 cheaper inc VAT at the time of writing).

The results in catia-03 were very similar, and the Supermicro was well ahead in ensight-04, sw-03 and snx-01, implying that it will be better suited to these engineering, CAD and design applications.

However, the scores for lightwave-01 and maya-03 don't bode well for TV and film 3D animators, whilst the proe-05 and tcvis-02 results were significantly behind as well.

There were improvements in most of these scores with Hyper-Speed enabled, although not enough to take the Supermicro past the K2000 system.

Overall, these results underline our original opinion that an AMD FirePro W7000 or W8000 would have been a much better fit for this workstation specification. Either you're going to need graphics or you're not. If you do, in a system that costs over £5,000, the additional £200 for a serious graphics card like the W7000 is definitely worth while.

To put these scores into perspective, when KitGuru tested the Asus Z9 PE-D8 dual Xeon workstation board back in October 2012, we were seeing Cinebench scores that were around 13% slower than the Supermicro SuperWorkstation in ‘frequency enhanced' mode.

The Supermicro SuperWorkstation delivered a peak of 28.78 while the Asus Z9 clocked 25.41 – compared to these numbers, Intel's most expensive desktop processor (4960X) only delivers 12.02 when clocked to 4GHz.

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