Supermicro 7047AX-TRF/72RF SuperWorkstation Preview

1. Introduction2. 2 Intel Xeon E5-2687W v23. SuperWorkstation Chassis4. High-Res Gallery5. Motherboard6. AMD FirePro W50007. Testing Methodology8. Maxon Cinebench R11.59. SPECviewperf 1110. Final Thoughts11. View All Pages

At KitGuru we are used to analysing the very first products in each new line-up. By and large, they come into the KitGuru Lab in the same way that they would off the shelf when one of our readers makes a purchase later. Today we have a very unusual first look at a product. It has been finalised, but there's no way to know how it will be configured for a customer – as SuperMicro can customise almost every aspect of a server.

A few years ago, the consumer and workstation ranges from Intel were released at similar times, as they were based on variants of the same core architecture. While the Core and Xeon ranges do still benefit from parallel core developments, the release dates are now far apart.

As a result, the Xeon processors based on Intel's Ivy Bridge architecture are only just arriving, whilst the mobile and desktop platforms have been transitioning over to Intel's Haswell for a few months now.

Our first taste of the new Ivy Bridge workstation and server processor comes from one of the heavyweights of server and workstation hardware – Supermicro. As a manufacturer of both motherboards and chassis, Supermicro is in a position to provide a more integrated solution than some of its competitors, at least in theory.

The Supermicro 7047AX-TRF/72RF SuperWorkstation comes in a chassis that can be deployed either as a pedestal tower, or as a 4U rack mounted unit, which could be handy if you plan on using a bunch of them in a render farm, or need a transportable system built into a cabinet flight case. However, the processors inside this chassis are the main stars of the show.

.System Specification

– Case: Supermicro CSE-747TG-R1K28B-SQ 4U rack mountable tower.
– Power Supply: 1280W Redundant High-efficiency Digital Power Supplies w/ PMBus 1.2.
– CPU: Dual Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2687W v2 3.40GHz @ 3.536GHz Ivy Bridge-EP CPUs.
– Motherboard: Super X9DAX-iF (Socket R LGA 2011) Motherboard.
– Cooler: Passive.
– RAM: 64GB DDR3 1600MHz ECC REG RoHS (8x 8GB).
– Hard Drive: 2TB Western Digital 7,200rpm hard disk.
– Graphics Card: AMD FirePro W5000 2048MB Graphics Card.
– Sound: Stereo.
– Optical Drive: 24x DVD+/-RW SATA Drive.

The Xeon E5-2687W v2 is the new king of Intel's eight-core workstation processor range, aimed at dual-socket systems.

Its release coincides with the introduction of the first 12-core Xeon E5's, although these are considerably more expensive while running at a significantly lower clock than the fastest eight-core parts. So unless you are purely using applications that benefit more from lots of cores than clock speed, such as rendering, the eight-core Xeons will give you greater all-round ability.

All of the new processors use the Ivy Bridge-EP variant of Intel's Ivy Bridge architecture. They are produced using a 22nm process. The more recent Haswell core also uses this process, but has an updated core, which is currently only available for Xeons aimed at single-processor systems, notebooks and mainstream desktops. Intel has famously operated a “Tick-Tock” strategy for some years now, where new architectures and die size reductions are alternated. So Ivy Bridge is essentially a shrunken version of the previous Sandy Bridge generation.

It does have some notable enhancements, particularly in the integrated graphics department, but few Xeons offer this facility.

So the Xeon E5-2687W v2 is essentially a shrinkage of the originally E5-2687W. But the reduction in size has some notable benefits. For a start, the original processor ran at a nominal 3.1GHz, whilst the new version operates at 3.4GHz.

Both offer Intel Turbo Boost modes, but whilst the first iteration can operate a single core at 3.8GHz, version 2 increases this to 4GHz, and all cores can run at 3.6GHz for extended periods. The new Xeon also runs cooler than the previous version, despite having the same 150W TDP rating, and Supermicro has taken advantage of this by employing passive CPU heat sinks rather than active ones, using the chassis airflow to take the heat away from these.

It also means there is headroom for increased frequencies, while at the same time reducing the number of moving parts (and, by implication, failure points).

 

The Supermicro motherboard supports Hyper-Speed, which means processor speeds can be enhanced for additional performance. Supermicro has used this feature on the SuperWorkstation to increase the Xeon clocks by 4 per cent, so both are running at a nominal 3.536GHz, with parallel 4 per cent improvements to Turbo Boost frequencies as well.

It's worth noting that the new chips also support 1,866MHz DDR3 memory, but Supermicro didn't have the appropriate qualified ECC Registered memory for its motherboard at the time of review. Instead, eight 8GB 1,600MHz DDR3 DIMMs were supplied, for a grand total of 64GB. This will be sufficient for the time being, but there are two banks of four slots for each of the two processors, so eight more slots are free for upgrade.

The X9DAX-iF motherboard supports up to 1TB of RAM, too, so there is effectively unlimited opportunity for improvement in this area.

Two related things were evident about the Supermicro system as soon as we got it out of the box. Firstly, it's very solidly built which, at the same time, makes it incredibly heavy. This is not a system you will want to move between offices, or even around an office, unless you absolutely have to. The side panel is secured by a locking catch, but also two screws at the rear that are not thumbscrews.

If you do have a reason to access the internals on a regular basis, we suspect these screws will be left off as the catch secures the panel firmly. This would be particularly likely if the chassis is installed on its side in a 4U rack mount.

  

.The chassis includes a bank of four internal fans to draw air in from the front of the system, with a couple more at the rear to draw air out.

This forms a flow across the two processor sockets, so the passive coolers can do their job of keeping the CPUs at a good operational temperature. This also draws air over the drive cages at the front.

These consist of three 5.25″ bays plus eight 3.5″ hot-swap bays. Only one of the latter was inhabited in our review unit, with a 2TB Western Digital 7,200rpm SATA hard disk. This will provide plenty of capacity to get you up and running, but we generally expect workstations to use solid state drives for operating system and applications, with faster loading speeds, alongside a series of large conventional hard drives for media data storage.

Supplying a single drive in a home PC for less than £1,000 makes sense, but we're not sure about the logic here. We'll assume that this is a ‘baseline' that can be used as a template – to be populated by a customer to their individual requirements.

  

.The chassis allows for dual-redundant power supplies, with two 1280W units installed. The front offers a pair of USB ports and a plethora of status lights, alongside the power and reset buttons.

Essentially, this is a rather serious and businesslike box. There are no front audio connections and no memory card reader is included.

On this page we present some high resolution images (3,000×1,798) of the product, taken with Canon equipment. These images may take slightly longer to download on a slower connection. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit KitGuru.net as the owner/source.

  

  

The Super X9DAX-iF (Socket R LGA 2011) motherboard uses Intel's C602 chipset. We have already mentioned its 16 DIMM slots, eight per Socket R (LGA 2011).

It also offers two 16-lane PCI Express 3.0 slots, three eight-lane PCI Express 3.0 slots, and a further slot which can either be used for an eight-lane PCI Express 3.0 Supermico Universal IO card or a four-lane PCI Express 2.0 card.

There are eight SATA 2 and two SATA 3 ports, plus dual Gigabit Ethernet ports driven by an Intel i350 chipset, and another LAN port for IPMI 2.0 management.

There are two USB 3.0 ports on the rear panel, plus four USB 2.0, with headers available for an additional two in each category.

This port allocation will be more than adequate for a workstation environment.

  

The SuperWorkstation relies on an AMD FirePro W5000 card for primary graphics acceleration.

We find this a slightly curious choice as a partner for a pair of top-of-the-range eight-core Xeons. We would have expected a W7000 or W8000, to match the processor power. The W5000 is still a good card, but it's aimed more at the low-to-mid range than the high-end that the CPUs are targeting.

The W5000 sports 768 Stream Processors, compared to 1,280 for the W7000, 1,792 for the W8000, and 2,048 for the flagship W9000. Its core clock is also marginally slower than its three siblings. You still get a decent 2GB GDDR5 memory, with 102.4GB/sec bandwidth.

On the plus side, power consumption is under 75W, so this card contributes well to the overall quietness of the system.

  

Formal testing procedure for this system sparked some interesting debate at KitGuru Labs. Unlike a system that you might pick up in the high street, each and every customer will have a unique set of requirements – as well as the budget necessary to get that customisation.

For example, the set up and hardware for high-frequency trading will be different from image processing/rendering software that runs on the CPU and packages that are GPU aware.

We ran a selection of professional 3D-oriented benchmarks on the Supermicro. To test raw rendering ability we called upon Maxon Cinebench R11.5, which is based on Maxon's increasingly popular Cinema 4D modelling and animation software. The render test is fully multi-threaded and so will show the potential benefit of a multi-core system. Cinebench R11.5 also includes an OpenGL preview, which illustrates how smooth the modelling experience will be. Unlike the render test, the OpenGL test is primarily influenced by the performance of the graphics hardware.

In order to test the graphics capabilities still further, we also ran the SPECviewperf 11 OpenGL test. This performs a series of eight benchmarks based on a selection of the leading 3D content creation CAD/CAM and engineering applications.

The catia-03 test is based on the CATIA V5 R19 and V9 R2009 CAD application from Dassault Systems, whilst ensight-04 is based on CEI's EnSight 8.2 CAD, FEA and CFD application. The 3D content creation tests include lightwave-01, based on NewTek's Lightwave 9.6, and maya-03, based on Autodesk Maya 2009.

For engineering and design, there is proe-05 based on Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 from PTC, sw-03 based on SolidWorks 2009 SP2 from Dassault Systemes, tcvis-02 based on the Siemens Teamcenter Visualization Mockup and snx-01 based on Siemens NX7. So this represents a broad range of professional 3D applications.

Changes to the storage and graphics sub-systems can affect certain benchmarks in a big way, but these numbers will give you a strong idea on relative performance.

Maxon Cinebench R11.5 shows the Supermicro in a very favourable light.

The score of 27.78 in rendering is 10 per cent faster than a workstation using version one of the Xeon E5-2687W.

The latter's much higher-end NVIDIA Quadro K5000 graphics also only managed a five per cent boost over the Supermicro's W5000 card, although Cinebench traditionally runs faster on AMD graphics.

With Hyper-Speed enabled, there were sizeable increases to both results.

Either way, if you're a Maxon Cinema 4D user, the Supermicro would make a great basis for a modelling and rendering system.

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.

The Supermicro 7047AX-TRF/72RF SuperWorkstation is a big, powerful box, but it has a couple of serious flaws if purchased in its ‘raw' state.

There's no doubt that the new Ivy Bridge version 2 of the Xeon E5-2687W is a significant improvement over its predecessor. The Supermicro system shows the potential this has for multi-threaded tasks like rendering.

However, the choice of graphics does not match this power, unless modelling will be an insignificant part of your workflow. We really would expect a more powerful graphics card – at least an AMD FirePro W7000 or NVIDIA Quadro K4000 – to match the capabilities of the processor.

We would also expect a solid state disk for operating system and main applications, which is usually the norm in contemporary 3D content creation workstations. This would significantly reduce boot and application loading times.

Despite these omissions, the price of £5,999 plus VAT isn't overly expensive in the professional work space.

A similarly specified Dell Precision T7600 workstation would cost about the same, although we also checked prices with a local British vendor and found this to be around £300 less for a similar set of components.

If the SuperWorkstation has been supplied with better graphics and a solid state disk, to provide a more rounded performance in modelling as well as rendering, for the same price, it would have been an excellent system. But in its current form the specification seems unbalanced.

Pros

• Incredibly fast multi-threaded rendering
• RAM can be expanded to 1TB, with eight slots available
• Lots of hot-swap 3.5in drive bays
• Dual-redundant power supplies
• Passive CPU cooling cannot fail, good in a server room
• Professional level warranty

Cons

• Mid-range AMD FirePro W5000 graphics doesn't match processor specification
• No solid state disk for main operating system and applications
• Costs well over £5,000, but not supplied with any kind of RAID storage in situ
• Cheaper systems with similar specification are available
• Chassis seems unnecessarily heavy
• Styling seems old fashioned
• Noisy for a workstation that you're sitting next to all day.

In the final analysis,  it's clear to see where this system scores.

KitGuru Labs has never tested a system with a higher Cinebench 11.5 score, so if your application is CPU intensive, then the power of having two frequency enhanced Intel E5 2687W processors chewing through tons of  data together could make a powerful financial argument in favour of spending way over £5,000. In a commercial environment, this kind of system could be working almost non-stop, so even a 10-20% processing advantage could give your company the ability to do a lot more invoicing by the end of the year – easily paying for the increased spend on hardware.

Plus, the passive cooling and multiple redundancies built into things like the power supplies, means the chance of being forced into downtime for a repair is significantly reduced.

That brings us to the negatives. Aesthetics might not be as important as they would be in the consumer space, but with Apple's new Mac Pro looking a lot like Darth Vader's R2D2 unit, we believe that there will be more of a connection between how fast something looks and how much you're willing to pay for it.

The weight is uncomfortable and we can't see the advantage, given how many strong new materials there are on the market each year. With regard to noise, if it had been a ‘dedicated server' then we wouldn't have touched on this at all, but the graphics card and product name indicate that it would be near people – in which case we would like more attention paid to noise levels – especially since the CPUs are passively cooled.

The last of our comments relate to the basic specification being shipped. Given that the system is completely adaptable, maybe Supermicro is right not to pre-install lots of drives or go with a much higher end graphics card.

Western Digital produces a 2TB ‘Black' drive, targeted at the workstation market with a 5 year warranty and is available for just over £100 to the end user. Using a pair of these would have given the system basic data protection with almost no effect on the final price.

That leaves us with the graphics card. While the W5000 is capable, it doesn't shine in any benchmark. Checking online, we find the AMD FirePro W7000 is around £462 + VAT. In terms of cost to the manufacturer, the W7000 might be around £200 more than the W5000, but what do you get for your money?  Lining up the specifications, close to double on almost everything:-

But then we come down to the price. While the mainboard, graphics card and processors account for half the price, there is still a lot of money being asked for here without an obvious win for the customer.

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KitGuru says: While there is no denying the upgradeability of this platform, the basic spec provided simply doesn't make sense for any specific application. Adding the second hard drive, booting off an SSD and moving to an AMD FirePro W7000 – with the price closer to £5,995 – would have made for a much more balanced system. That said, the raw CPU processing power on offer here is unparalleled, making it a great choice for media houses that will customise before placing their order.

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