Last month Neil Bennett and Andrew Harrison (pictured below) from IDG publications Digital Arts and PC Advisor dropped by the Boston lab to have an early look at some of our Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 V2-equipped systems. Of particular interest was the 'supercar' Boston Venom 2401-7T that boasts two 3.4GHz 8-core Xeon E5 2687W V2 processors, 64GB of 1,866MHz RAM, dual NVIDIA® GPUs, and liquid cooling technology.
Neil took a Venom 2401-7T back to the Digital Arts lab to conduct a series of tests and benchmarks, one of which was comparing the V1 and V2 CPUs in the same system. He found an 8.2% increase in performance from V1 to V2, which at first glance may not look supremely impressive despite the significant improvements brought by the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture. However, in the real world a close to 10% performance improvement can slash the wait time for complex rendering or other processor intensive tasks.
Boston also assisted in re-configuring the system to run a single CPU to provide a comparison with Apple's forthcoming Mac Pro. The Cinebench benchmark rated the single CPU workstation as delivering 97% better rendering than an 8-core Mac Pro 2013 - impressive stuff!
Digital Arts have held onto the system to conduct further tests to fully assess the Venom 2401-7T and offer a complete view of what exactly makes it the most powerful PC they've ever seen. We can't wait to see the results.
You can read the full article here, and learn more about the Venom 2401-7T here.