Intel Xeon E5-2670 Review

Boston Venom 2000-7T

Manufacturer: Boston
UK Price (as reviewed): £5,499 (exc VAT) (£6,958 inc VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): N/A

As part of our Xeon E5-2670 testing, we also got our mits on one of the first workstations available in the UK to sport the new Xeons, along with 32GB RAM and a Quadro 4000 graphics card. Built by Boston, a Hertfordshire-based server, workstation and storage provider, the Venom 2000-7T is built inside a Lian Li PC-90B case, which feels very sturdy and comes complete with all the usual modern gubbins such as USB 3, 2.5in SSD mounts, washable fan filters.


The tidily-built insides can deal with ATX, XL-ATX, E-ATX and H-PTX motherboards, and Boston has opted for a dual socket, LGA2011 Supermicro X9DAi, 865W Supermicro PWS-865-PQ PSU, and a PNY Quadro 4000 graphics card. Boston's systems are configurable, like most etailers, but with the Venom 2000-7T we looked at includes a 128GB Crucial M4, 1TB Hitachi HDS721010CLA332 and 32GB of Supermicro 4GB DDR3-1600 1R 4 ECC Registered memory.

At the heart of the system are two Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs running at their stock speed (Supermicro motherboards don't offer overclocking) of 2.6GHz, although they can TurboBoost to 3GHz. Combined with their individual TDP's of 115W, they helped keep the system extremely quite, even under load. While the current PCI Express 2.1 bus hasn't really been stretched in the more mainstream areas of the industry, the additional 500MB/sec bandwidth per lane provided by support of PCI Express 3.0 in the new Xeon E5 series, will mean that you're able to drop in a PCI Express 3.0 graphics card at a future date, should you need more horsepower in this area.


Included with the system is a copy of Windows 7 64-bit Professional (Professional is needed to address more than one CPU socket) and it comes with one year onsite warranty, followed by two years return to base.


System specifcations

• CPU: Xeon E5-2670 2.6GHz
  
• Motherboard: Supermicro X9DAi
  
• Memory: 32GB Supermicro 4GB DDR3-1600 1R 4 ECC REGISTERED
  
• Case: Lian Li PC-90B
  
• Power Supply: 865W Supermicro PWS-865-PQ
  
• Storage: 128GB Crucial M4, 1TB Hitachi HDS721010CLA332
  
• Optical drive: Supermicro DVD-RW
  
• Graphics card: PNY Quadro 4000
  
• Operating system: Windows 7 64-bit Professional
  
• Warranty: One year Onsite, two years RTB, 1 year OSW, 2 years RTB warranty

**For performance, see Intel Xeon E5-2670 performance results which begin here**

Performance Anaylysis
As you can read elsewhere in our coverage of the Intel Xeon E5-2670, it performed amazingly well compared to previous generation CPUs and made short work of the more mainstream desktop counterparts. With 32 threads available, the Boston Venom 2000-7T battered our heavily multi-threaded benchmarks, regularly posting results that were not just faster than previous generation Xeons, but heavily overclocked ones too.

In Terragen 2 for example, only the overclocked X5680's and the 4.7GHz Core i7-3930K were able to top the stock speed E5-2670s. Euler3D was perhaps the best result of all, with the E5-2670s outstripping even the overclocked X5680s by a long way, with a score of 14.804Hz, compared to 12.273Hz for the older Xeons. In our LightWave 11 scene rendering benchmark, the Boston Venom 2000-7T shaved over five minutes off the result of the two Intel Xeon X5690's, finishing in 18 minutes instead of over 23 minutes.

With the CPU under load, the system drew 395W, and drew 202W at idle, yet it remained extremely quiet throughout the testing. The Supermicro SNK0P54 CPU coolers did a good job of keeping the CPUs cool, with the highest temperature we recorded in the moderately warm test lab we were in being 75°C.

Conclusion
The only benchmarks the Boston Venom 2000-7T didn't obliterate were the older less heavily-threaded in our lineup - it's unlikely you'll be buying a workstation such as this for similar tasks, but worth remembering. Everywhere else, it proved to be vastly superior to previous generation CPUs, and a clear cut above other Sandy Bidge E CPUs - the latter might offer good performance for a low end workstation, but the Venom 2000-7T is by no means a low-end system. It's a powerhouse of multi-threaded performance, yet it's quieter than many desktop PCs we've heard. If you're in the market for a Workstation that uses Intel's stunning new Xeon, the Venom 2000-7T should be on the top of your list.