[HN Gopher] Lenovo ThinkStation P620 Review: A Vehicle for Threa...
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Lenovo ThinkStation P620 Review: A Vehicle for Threadripper Pro
Author : neogodless
Score : 49 points
Date : 2021-02-16 15:16 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anandtech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anandtech.com)
| mstipetic wrote:
| A bit off topic but I got annoyed by laptops and bought a used
| Lenovo ThinkCenter tower for a few hundred euros and couldn't be
| happier. They're really well made, with high end components (i7
| 7700, 32GB ECC), and after I've stuck a graphics card in it I'm
| sure I'm set for years to come.
|
| I'm actually surprised how incremental the progress was over the
| last decade, with regards to CPUs and to a lesser extent GPUs.
| I'd strongly suggest trying to reuse older hardware instead of
| spending $1000+ on new one
| sp332 wrote:
| I don't think the i7 7700 supports ECC RAM?
| mstipetic wrote:
| I may well be wrong. Really not a hardware guy. Just super
| happy to have something that feels much snappier than my
| macbook and can run doom eternal for a few hundred euro
| leetcrew wrote:
| > I'm actually surprised how incremental the progress was over
| the last decade, with regards to CPUs and to a lesser extent
| GPUs.
|
| sort of an odd thing to say when you just bought a machine with
| the last i7 desktop part to have only four cores. i7-7700 is
| only about 20% faster than an i7-2700k, but the 9700 and 10700
| parts are way faster in any multi-threaded scenario.
| mstipetic wrote:
| I really don't want to argue, I'm just saying I remember a
| time when a 2,3 year old computer was worthless.. There are
| videos of people playing modern AAA game titles (on low
| settings of course, but at 1080p) with CPUs from 10 years ago
| and GPUs from 5+ years ago.
| tsomctl wrote:
| I'm running a Thinkpad T530 with Intel graphics. Ram is maxxed
| out, I have a SSD, and I upgraded the screen to 1920x1080. It's
| more responsive than most other computers that I use. The only
| thing it struggles with is playing HD Youtube videos and WoW at
| the same time, and compiling large programs. Really, I think by
| this point, I'm on my second one, since I keep replacing parts
| when they wear out.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> I'm actually surprised how incremental the progress was over
| the last decade_
|
| I think you're a bit over-exaggerating here as it really
| depends on what you do with your PC and where you're coming
| from.
|
| If you've only been running Intel this whole time and all you
| do is light workloads then you won't notice much progress since
| they haven't made much, but if do CPU demanding tasks and were
| to try a Ryzen 3xxx/4xxx, or better yet, a 5xxx, you'll notice
| a huge leap forward (if you could find one in stock, that is).
|
| However, your "new" 7700 is a bit old in the tooth now and,
| despite Intel's lack of major progress, it will still be left
| in the dust by a newer 10th/11th gen chip.
|
| My old faithful Intel Q6600 still serves my parents just fine
| after 14 years of age, but I'm not gonna pretend it isn't slow
| by today's standards on the modern bloated web and with all the
| electron crap.
| mstipetic wrote:
| For sure, but for let's say gaming purposes a computer that
| was top of the line 5 or so years ago is still completely
| fine. I haven't been paying much attention as I was just
| buying a macbook for the last 10 years, but I remember a time
| when I was younger and a 2 year old computer was worthless.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Gaming also has its own different problems and pressures.
| For one, it's rarely a great move to make something that's
| far beyond the capabilities of the current-gen consoles
| since so many things will launch on them also. Even the
| "Pro" variants of this last generation were about 5 years
| ago by now.
|
| You'd expect as the current console generation actually
| gets off the ground to start seeing more demanding upper
| settings, and eventually more demanding minimums.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Holy moley, $35K (after discount) for the top of the line box.
| Maybe I'll look around for a used one of those in about 10 years.
| jrockway wrote:
| That build includes $18,000 worth of graphics cards.
|
| If you need it, you need it, and there's no competition in that
| space, so it's expensive. But, if you aren't doing whatever
| GV100s are good at (machine learning? raytracing?) then you can
| probably get a C++ compilation rig and web browser with 64
| cores for ~$10,000. (I suppose that's another "if you need it,
| you need it" case. But at least more straightforward to the
| software engineers among us -- if you have more than 64 C++
| files to compile... the 64 core chip can be useful. Even "go
| test ./..." in a moderately-sized project uses all 32 of my
| non-pro threadripper cores. Briefly. Not doing as much work as
| the C++ compiler. :)
| Jonnax wrote:
| I'm still amazed that Intel doesn't have anything that can
| compete with AMD's 64 core workstation processor.
|
| Have they got PCIe Gen 4 yet?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Intel has been shipping pcie 4 CPUs since Q3 last year, but not
| on workstations. Rocket Lake parts, supposedly to be released
| soon, will have pcie 4. Presumably future workstations will be
| based on Ice Lake microarchitecture, and these also have pcie
| 4, but they also don't exist yet.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| It seems like Intel is skipping PCIe-4 altogether, and just
| moving on to 5
| jrockway wrote:
| Interesting to me is Lenovo's decision to include cooling fans on
| the RAM. If you read the enthusiast forums, it's something that
| most everyone makes fun of, but something I've always wondered
| about myself. My Threadripper build initially had pretty hot
| memory, because there was no way to get airflow to the "back"
| half (Lenovo arranges the memory horizontally, but they're
| vertical on my board). Eventually I improved temps by mounting my
| GPU "upright" (i.e. attached a a riser with the PCI-E fingers
| facing down), and this gave the bottom intake fans some way to
| get cold air over the RAM in the back. But, what I've learned
| from this is that when an OEM works closely with AMD, they
| actively cool the RAM. Very interesting.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Is the thinkstation rated for high(ish) temp operation?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Interesting to me is Lenovo's decision to include cooling
| fans on the RAM._
|
| IIRC, these workstations are made for VFX houses where they'll
| probably render scenes nearly 24/7, weekends included, so
| Lenovo didn't fuck around with the cooling for such a demanding
| use case.
|
| If you're on a crunch to finish that epic 30 second shot worth
| six-figures for that upcoming Hollywood blockbuster then you
| want the best pro-grade tools you can get that you can leave
| running for days and sleep soundly knowing they'll do their job
| and not hang up or throttle. Any major downtime in this racket
| is worth more than that workstation.
|
| _> If you read the enthusiast forums, it's something that most
| everyone makes fun of_
|
| True, because most "enthusiasts" on forums are just well-off
| gamers or posers showing off their expensive setups for
| upvotes, that are just used 2-6 hours a day for video games and
| scrolling through reddit instead of 24/7 workloads responsible
| for a business's revenue stream.
| willis936 wrote:
| The VRMs are more important. They have a real chance of
| thermal runaway, consistently are the hottest component in
| any system, and are one of the most common elements to fail.
| As far as I can tell from the images, the P620 VRMs are given
| a generous heatsink with good airflow. Active cooling on the
| RAM? Sure, why not? It won't hurt. It won't really help
| either, assuming the case has acceptable airflow.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > these workstations are made for VFX houses where they'll
| probably render scenes nearly 24/7, weekends included
|
| They render VFX on employee workstations? Why don't they
| render in a data centre with proper cooling and things? Must
| make the offices very hot!
| StillBored wrote:
| Well at least in the past they did. For example:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/video/lucasfilm-data-center-and-the-
| real...
| mywittyname wrote:
| Not a VFX worker, but I did CAD simulations for a while
| (which uses very similar equipment, Xeons, Quadros, 128+GB
| ram) and we would definitely run tasks like test suites
| over the weekend on our personal workstations because there
| was no guarantee that the cluster we used for testing would
| ever actually run your workloads. This was especially true
| when releases were close.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| You use clusters to render a whole/movie scene when it's
| finished or in various stages of completion to show to the
| art directors but you still need powerful workstations to
| preview your own changes to the scene as you work on it.
|
| Plus, clusters aren't always at your disposal and usually
| have schedules when you can book them according to priority
| and not all workflow can be automated and pipelined to fit
| a cluster. VFX work is not just 3D modelling where you
| click _Render_ and boom, 2 days later, your scene it 's
| ready to be put on film. There's tons of tasks you need to
| do pre- and post- production like layout, rigging, motion
| capture, rotoscoping, comping, etc. and most of these tasks
| are done manually on the artist's workstation.
|
| I'm sure big houses like ILM, Pixar, Weta, Disney have the
| money and technical chops to engineer and maintain their
| own in-house rendering cluster infrastructure but small
| firms don't and rely on beefy workstations like this to
| render their project over multiple days.
| offtop5 wrote:
| >*Current Februrary Offer for 42% Discount on Direct Sales
|
| This is the one thing I hate about Lenovo. Just show me the price
| , creating MEGA sales to try and entice me into buying isn't cool
| [deleted]
| lostmsu wrote:
| Too bad they don't seem to offer RTX 3XXX GPU options.
| tanelpoder wrote:
| I bought a RTX 3090 separately and it works in my P620 just
| fine.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Part of buying a workstation with an online configurator is
| that you don't have to assemble it yourself.
| tanelpoder wrote:
| Yup, I totally get it. I had to tinker with power cables
| (the EVGA RTX 3090 required 3 x 8 pin power connectors).
| Also, cooling - I couldn't get my hands on a blower-style
| RTX card, so the GPU just dumps its heat inside the
| chassis.
|
| I also bought cheap "eBay memory" instead of the more
| expensive Lenovo offering and had to reseat DIMMs a few
| times to stop having ECC errors (the memory scrubbing
| feature is nice).
| jeffbee wrote:
| Those are mobile GPUs. There's nothing in their workstation
| line card with a 3000 name.
| jojobas wrote:
| As far as I understand, the only Lenovo-specific item in the
| build is the motherboard, still based on a generic chipset.
|
| Is there any benefit compared to building from individually
| purchased components?
| wmf wrote:
| These components weren't supposed to be available separately,
| although that's changing.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Would have been cool to see it go head-to-head with the HP z8 G4.
| The internal construction of the Lenovo is a little disappointing
| considering the price point. HP's internal air baffling is a lot
| more thought-out.
|
| For this price from HP you get the same GPU, 56 cores, 192GB of
| memory, and 16 TB of SSDs with 6 m.2 slots left open, and
| thunderbolt which the Lenovo lacks.
| CobaltFire wrote:
| I bought one of these and after using it for about a week I'm
| absolutely in love.
|
| I kept the 3945WX (and the rest of the base spec), added a W5700
| and a second 10GbE card, then installed an AX200/BT5.1 card,
| second SSD, and three more DIMMs (64GB total) when it got here.
|
| Outstanding machine for the price if you can get it on discount!
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what do you use it for, if I may ask?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Not the OP, but I was looking to buy a couple of these for my
| team for database code optimization work. I have an older TR
| build with 128 GB or RAM, 3x nVME, 2xSSD and 3xHDD (3 tiers
| of storage performance) built for about $3000, so we can run
| almost any database from production on it and tune the code
| and indexes. With 8 memory channels we can go to 256GB of
| cheap UDIMM (32GB each) instead of using expensive high
| density RDIMM or LRDIMM. Also the number of PCIe connections
| allow for enough nVME drives, something a desktop CPU - AMD
| or Intel - cannot do.
|
| From my limited perspective, the 2 benefits of TR over Ryzen
| at low CPU count are the PCIe lanes and memory channels and
| slots. If you need a high CPU count then there is no other
| choice but TR.
| CobaltFire wrote:
| Please note these are restricted to RDIMMs. They are
| essentially rebranded EPYCs.
|
| I chose this system for exactly the reasons you listed at
| "low" (is 12 low now?) core counts: PCIe lanes and memory
| bandwidth.
|
| Also, it's just awesome.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Is it limited? The CPU supports UDIMM and LRDIMM in
| addition to RDIMM, so if there is any restriction then it
| is coming from Lenovo, not from AMD.
| CobaltFire wrote:
| You have a point; RDIMMs were cost effective enough for
| me that I didn't think to investigate further.
|
| I can see if I can scare up some UDIMMs and test, but I
| don't think I have any DDR4 around.
| cartoonfoxes wrote:
| I'm running mine in a very similar config as a lab VM host
| and for occasional product rendering. I would have preferred
| more cores, but the 3945WX is what work would buy me. The
| base-spec P620 is fairly cost-effective if you can find it on
| discount.
| CobaltFire wrote:
| Honestly I was just looking to build a new PC, and this ended
| up cheaper (can't quote the exact price, but after the
| upfitting it was less than $2500 taxed and delivered) and
| easier than dealing with scalpers when a friend found he
| could (legally) offer me a discount through his company.
|
| My home PC has very little to do with my day job at this
| time, so I acknowledge it's complete overkill for that.
| However, I'm looking at needing to transition careers in a
| couple of years and so this will likely be used as a homelab
| in a box. I also game, dabble in coding (playing with a game
| idea in Unity right now), etc.
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