By Mike McCarthy

I have had the opportunity to test the two most powerful single-socket workstations available on the market today. Last year’s review of the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 looked at what is still the only new desktop workstation to be released by a major system vendor since 2017. It’s Threadripper Pro 3995WX 64-core processor is the pinnacle of AMD’s Threadripper CPU lineup and the only Threadripper-based system available from a major manufacturer. The Threadripper Pro lineup has since been refreshed to the 5000-series CPUs, and while they are slightly faster, they still use the same architecture, motherboards and chipsets.

I had a chance to test out Boxx’s Xeon W-3300-based Apexx Matterhorn workstation. With 38 cores, eight channels of memory and 64 PCIe lanes, the Xeon W-3375 processor is the single-socket version of Intel’s newest “Ice Lake” Xeon chips.

Each system design has its strengths, and each system has a few caveats I have discovered. Some of these features and issues are a result of Intel and AMD, and others are from the implementations by Lenovo and Boxx, which based its system on a Supermicro motherboard. I have had a year to find all of the peculiarities on the P620, while I have only had the Boxx system for about two months. Even so, I have compiled as much data as I can on each one to make as thorough of a comparison as possible.

I have both the GeForce 3090 and A6000 Nvidia GPUs to test with, as well as a few others, so I was able to swap between them to see whether the A6000 was any faster than the GeForce and how much the GPUs impacted the performance measurements. While there are surely cases where the A6000’s professional drivers would offer better performance in certain 3D applications, I did not see a major performance difference between them in any of my tests.

This means that a) I recommend the cheaper GeForce option for most users, and b) I didn’t publish separate benchmarks for both GPUs since the results were within a couple percentage points of each other. The only notable difference I did find is that the boot problems I have with the AMD system when an 8K display is attached are solved when I use the A6000 instead of the GeForce card.

The Lenovo system was shipped to me with 32GB of RAM, only using two of the eight memory channels, which is likely capping performance in certain cases. It also has a PCIe 3.0 SSD since the 4.0 ones were harder to come by back then. The Boxx has 64GB of memory spread across all eight channels, which should help. It also has a PCIe 4.0 SSD, which has twice the peak transfer rate for high-resolution uncompressed playback tests. So those are some of the configuration-based limitations that could impact the results, which might not apply if you configure and buy a new system.

Both systems play back my 8K assets and various camera Raw files in Adobe Premiere Pro in real time without issue. The Xeon plays back 8K DPXs, but I am confident the Lenovo could do that too if it had a PCIe 4.0 SSD. Both have integrated 10GbE ports with support for NBase-T, although the Boxx system has an extra Gigabit Ethernet port. The Boxx system supports IPMI system management, but Lenovo has its own set of system management tools that I am less familiar with.

The AMD system has the option for Thunderbolt 3 support via an add-in card, but due to motherboard limitations, the Intel system does not. This is ironic considering Intel created Thunderbolt. There might be other motherboard choices that do support Thunderbolt, but I can’t find any online.

Here is a point-by-point comparison of some of the differences:

Neither is a clear winner over the other, and different motherboard manufacturers might deliver different results for certain functionality. The AMD processor is better for animation rendering, but the Xeon performs better in Adobe After Effects. The difference is negligible in Premiere Pro, which is my primary application, so there is not much distinction there.

Lenovo

Although I don’t recommend updating to Windows 11 without a specific reason to make that change, I did investigate it for these systems. The Boxx system requires that you install a TPM 2.0 card to support Windows 11. This will, of course, be included once Boxx starts supporting Windows 11, but it didn’t come in my review system. The P620 does support upgrading to Windows 11, and the trick there was to avoid it until I was ready. I put off all of Microsoft’s promptings until I was finished with all my other tests in case anything went wrong. I usually don’t recommend upgrading an OS compared to a fresh install, but I figured I would give it a try. The operating system updated fine, but I did have some issues in Adobe Media Encoder and a few other apps that weren’t ready for the transition, so I recommend that most professional users stick with Windows 10 for now.

With the Threadripper system, I did have a lot of delays when making new folders, but that appears to have been helped by turning off “Show frequently used folders in Quick Access” in File Explorer Options. It still struggles with certain folders, and I haven’t found the cause. Other basic tasks have given me issues, like zip files and Illustrator save actions hanging for 60 seconds intermittently. But then it goes and plays back 8K HDR footage flawlessly from the AJA Kona 5 card.

I also had lots of problems with the Premiere interface for a month or two, but it turns out they were caused by a bug in Premiere 15 that only kicks in when a control surface is connected. So plugging in the Loupedeck+ console was the cause, not the change to an AMD-based system. It is so much quieter and more efficient than my rack-server-based beast of a home-grown workstation, and unlike the server or the Boxx workstation, it can be put to sleep or hibernated.

It you want a system from a larger system vendor, the P620 was the only game in town, being the first workstation from HP, Dell, or Lenovo, to support PCIe 4.0, among other features.  Dell has since then released the similar Precision 7865.  If you include smaller manufacturers in your search, that opens up options based on Intel’s Ice Lake Scalable Xeons and AMD Epyc CPUs, but the single-socket Xeon W chips are probably a better fit for most workstation users, like those featured in the Apexx Matterhorn.

Boxx

My Findings
If I had to buy a system for myself in that class today (presumably for PCIe lane reasons), I would buy the Lenovo P620 with the 16-core option and add a GeForce 3070 if I couldn’t use my existing parts. This is because it is cheaper and scales down farther than the Xeon option. (It sleeps and offers nearly instant boot so you can get back to work quickly.)

That said, many Adobe users would probably be better served by a system a few steps down from the ones covered here. The first step down would be the standard Threadripper processors, with half the channels of RAM and PCIe lanes of the Pro series. This actually isn’t a huge cost savings because Lenovo has put the Threadripper Pro into a well-designed and reasonably cost-effective package. Below Threadripper, there are Core X-based HEDT systems from Intel, which are placed firmly between these systems and consumer-level options. But the Core X299 platform was released in 2017 and lacks basic features like PCIe 4.0, among other things. I have set up HP Z4 systems that have worked well for clients who edit 4K projects, but that was years ago. Below that, we have consumer-level Core i9 and Ryzen systems that now feature up to 16 cores and 128GB RAM. These probably could meet the needs of more users than you would expect.

Looking upward, the Boxx solution supports four full, double-wide GPUs plus a sync card, which clearly exceeds the Lenovo if your application can use that much processing power effectively. So the Boxx clearly scales higher and can be much “faster” than the Lenovo if you add enough GPUs. That helps in maximizing potential performance before you need to jump to the next tier with a dual-socket system, which increases the price even more substantially, but the Lenovo design might appeal to a broader set of users. There is a much wider variety of workstation options available than there used to be, but you really need to understand your own processing needs, based on your target applications and workflows, to find the right solution for you. These systems are clearly the fastest single-socket systems available today, but they aren’t necessarily the best solution for every user.

Mike McCarthy is a technology consultant with extensive experience in the film post production. He started posting technology info and analysis at HD4PC in 2007. He broadened his focus with TechWithMikeFirst 10 years later.