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Welcome to the Battlestations 2018 thread! If you want to show your fellow Neowinians what your workstation/battlestation looks like, this is the place to do it. When posting, please note the following: If you plan to img-embed your picture, please try to keep it under 100k. Actually, it's best if you just link to it externally. If you are going to quote, there isn't a need to quote an img-embeded picture - Just don't do it. Please just reference the post by page number/page link/etc. The moderators of this forum reserve the right to edit or remove your posts as necessary in order that they will comply with the Community Rules. The Battlestations 2017 thread is not to be used as a means to post images of a pornographic or otherwise provocative nature, so please be mindful of the images that may appear on your battlestation. Please help to keep the thread relevant and safe to browse for everyone. Last year's Battlestations thread is here.

Apple's Mac Pro gets the most powerful AMD GPU ever with a whopping 120CUs and 64GB VRAM by Sayan Sen AMD today has released its most powerful workstation GPU ever with the new Radeon PRO W6800X Duo. The W6800X Duo features dual Navi 21 chips with a total of 120 Compute Units (CUs) or 7,680 Stream Processors (SPs). This is the star of the show in its new W6000X Pro lineup of professional-grade Radeon cards that will be available for Apple's Mac Pro. Alongside, the W6800X Duo, the new lineup consists of the 80CU/ 5,120 SPs Radeon PRO W6900X and the 60CU/ 3,840 SPs Radeon PRO W6800X. The W6800X is basically the single GPU version of the W6800X Duo behemoth. Radeon PRO W6800X Duo Earlier, AMD had already launched the 60CU PRO W6800 variant for non-Apple users but the two other cards are completely new today. The detailed specification of the cards are: The cards will of course feature 475W MPX connectors alongside the standard 75W PCIe one, for a total of 500W of power handling. And you can use the two MPX modules provided to double the available GPU performance. Speaking of performance, Apple is promising massive gains in rendering, especially when using the dual GPU Radeon PRO W6800X Duo card. The performance claims are shown in the images below (click to enlarge): OTOY Octane X DaVinci Resolve Maxon Cinema 4D Final Cut Pro You can find out more details on the upgraded Mac Pro 2021 specifications on Apple's official web page here and check out AMD's official press release here. While this is merely speculation, It will be interesting to see if AMD ever decides to build a dual GPU version of the full Navi 21-based Radeon PRO W6900X that will pack a total of 160 CUs or 10,240 SPs.

Canalys: Global PC market saw 25% YoY growth in 4Q20 by Paul Hill The analyst firm Canalys has reported that the global PC market saw 25% year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter of 2020. The firm classifies the PC market as desktops, notebooks (including Chromebooks) and workstations but excludes tablets which are sometimes used by some in place of a full-blown PC. Total PC shipments in 2020 grew by 11% reaching 297 million units. The full-year growth in the PC market is the highest that’s been seen since 2020 and the number of units shipped is the highest seen since 2014. The growth in 2020 was driven by laptops and mobile workstations; they saw a growth rate of 44% compared to 2019. Desktops, on the other hand, were less successful with shipments falling 20% compared to 2019; there were 61.9 million shipments in this segment of the market in 2020. In the fourth quarter, the biggest PC vendor was Lenovo which shipped 23.1 million units, in second place was HP which shipped 19.1 million units. Dell came in third place shipping more than 15 million units for the first time ever, Apple was in fourth place shipping 7.1 million units and Acer came fifth with 6.1 million units shipped. Other companies shipped a combined 18.9 million units in the fourth quarter. According to Canalys Research Director Rushabh Doshi, PCs have been at the centre of the digital transformation that the world has gone through in the past year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Doshi said that going forward it’s going to be “extremely difficult” to write off PCs and that it’s likely that they’re here to stay.

AMD announces Radeon Pro W5500 and Radeon Pro W5500M GPUs by Paul Hill AMD has announced the Radeon Pro W5500 and Radeon Pro W5500M graphics cards aimed at workstations and mobile workstations respectively. The GPUs are designed primarily to meet the needs of Design & Manufacturing and Architecture, Engineering & Construction professional, according to AMD. Some of the highlights of the new products include a redesigned geometry engine that enables up to 25% higher performance-per-clock than older previous-generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. The more powerful AMD Radeon Pro W5500 also improves multitasking performance with a 10x better application workflow than the competition. Despite AMD’s claims of better performance than the competition, the Radeon Pro W5500 consumes 32% less power than the competition. The complete specs for the devices are as follows: Compute Units TFLOPS (FP32) Maximum Power Consumption GDDR6 Memory Bandwidth Memory Interface Display Output (DisplayPort 1.4) AMD Radeon Pro W5500 22 Up to 5.35 125W 8GB Up to 224 GB/s 128-bit 4 (drives four 4K displays or one 8K display at 60Hz) AMD Radeon Pro W5500M 22 Up to 4.79 85W 4GB Up to 224 GB/s 128-bit 4 Talking about the new GPUs, Scott Herkelman, corporate vice president and general manager, Radeon Technologies Group at AMD, said: “Designers and engineers require a professional graphics solution that delivers the performance and efficiency to meet today’s unique challenges. Nothing is more stressful than a deadline, and AMD professional graphics keep performing when you need them most. The AMD Radeon Pro W5500 graphics card delivers exceptional power efficiency and leadership performance for 2D and 3D design applications, enabling them to better visualize and interact with their designs in real time, explore new immersive workflows like virtual reality and maximize productivity.” In terms of availability, the AMD Radeon Pro W5500 will be available from mid-February for $399. The AMD Radeon Pro W5500M GPU is expected to be available in “professional mobile workstations” from spring. The AMD Radeon Pro W5500 will also be showcased at AMD booth 208 at 3DEXPERIENCE World 2020 from February 10-12 in Nashville, Tennessee.

Lenovo announces new ThinkStation workstations with 48GB Quadro RTX 8000 by Rich Woods Today, Lenovo announced a couple of new workstation PCs, including the ThinkStation P720 and the P920. The latter was first announced back in November, boasting Nvidia's Quadro RTX graphics. The new workstations include Intel's second-generation Xeon Scalable CPUs, meaning that they can come with up to 28 cores and an increased frequency of up to 4.4GHz. With these CPUs, Lenovo is promising "unmatched levels of processing power". There's also support for the Nvidia Quadro RTX 8000, a beast of a GPU that packs 48GB of GDDR6 and Nvidia NVLink. As with any RTX GPU, it supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and the RTX 8000 gets 16.3 TFLOPs and 11 Giga Rays per second. Lenovo said that designing the thermals for PCs with such powerful internals wasn't easy. The company said that its engineers had to do a lot of work in understanding the power and thermal specifications of the new components. Both the ThinkStation P720 and the ThinkStation P920 will be available this month. Lenovo didn't specify pricing, but you can bet that they won't be cheap.

Welcome to the Battlestations 2017 thread! If you want to show your fellow Neowinians what your workstation/battlestation looks like, this is the place to do it. When posting, please note the following: If you plan to img-embed your picture, please try to keep it under 100k. Actually, it's best if you just link to it externally. If you are going to quote, there isn't a need to quote an img-embeded picture - Just don't do it. Please just reference the post by page number/page link/etc. The moderators of this forum reserve the right to edit or remove your posts as necessary in order that they will comply with the Community Rules. The Battlestations 2017 thread is not to be used as a means to post images of a pornographic or otherwise provocative nature, so please be mindful of the images that may appear on your battlestation. Please help to keep the thread relevant and safe to browse for everyone. Last year's Battlestations thread is here.

Microsoft reveals Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, for power users and high-performance PCs by Andy Weir In June, a leaked slide revealed that Microsoft was planning to introduce a new SKU of its operating system, dubbed 'Windows 10 Pro for Workstation PCs', although that name had not been finalized at the time. Today, it officially announced the new edition of the OS, now called Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. "Windows 10 Pro for Workstations is a high-end edition of Windows 10 Pro," Microsoft's Klaus Diaconu said today, adding that it "comes with unique support for server grade PC hardware and is designed to meet demanding needs of mission critical and compute intensive workloads." Diaconu said that the new SKU was "created with feedback from Windows Insiders", and will officially launch with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, which is coming later this year. He outlined four key areas in which Windows 10 Pro for Workstations will support and harness the power of high-performance PCs: ReFS (Resilient file system): ReFS provides cloud-grade resiliency for data on fault-tolerant storage spaces and manages very large volumes with ease. ReFS is designed to be resilient to data corruption, optimized for handling large data volumes, auto-correcting and more. It protects your data with integrity streams on your mirrored storage spaces. Using its integrity streams, ReFS detects when data becomes corrupt on one of the mirrored drives and uses a healthy copy of your data on the other drive to correct and protect your precious data. Persistent memory: Windows 10 Pro for Workstations provides the most demanding apps and data with the performance they require with non-volatile memory modules (NVDIMM-N) hardware. NVDIMM-N enables you to read and write your files with the fastest speed possible, the speed of the computer’s main memory. Because NVDIMM-N is non-volatile memory, your files will still be there, even when you switch your workstation off. Faster file sharing: Windows 10 Pro for Workstations includes a feature called SMB Direct, which supports the use of network adapters that have Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capability. Network adapters that have RDMA can function at full speed with very low latency, while using very little CPU. For applications that access large datasets on remote SMB file shares, this feature enables: Increased throughput: Leverages the full throughput of high speed networks where the network adapters coordinate the transfer of large amounts of data at line speed. Low latency: Provides extremely fast responses to network requests, and, as a result, makes remote file storage feel as if it is directly attached storage. Low CPU utilization: Uses fewer CPU cycles when transferring data over the network, which leaves more power available to other applications running on the system. Expanded hardware support: One of the top pain points expressed by our Windows Insiders was the limits on taking advantage of the raw power of their machine. Hence, we are expanding hardware support in Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. Users will now be able to run Windows 10 Pro for Workstations on devices with high performance configurations including server grade Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron processors, with up to 4 CPUs (today limited to 2 CPUs) and add massive memory up to 6TB (today limited to 2TB). Diaconu said that architectural changes that Microsoft has made in the Windows kernel bring significant optimizations for workstation-class processors, including Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron. He added that Microsoft has been working hard "to enable Windows power users to maximize every aspect of their high-performance device." Source: Windows Blogs

Welcome to the Battlestations 2016 thread! If you want to show your fellow Neowinians what your workstation/battlestation looks like, this is the place to do it. When posting, please note the following: If you plan to img-embed your picture, please try to keep it under 100k. Actually, it's best if you just link to it externally. If you are going to quote, there isn't a need to quote an img-embeded picture - Just don't do it. Please just reference the post by page number/page link/etc. The moderators of this forum reserve the right to edit or remove your posts as necessary in order that they will comply with the Community Rules. The Battlestations 2016 thread is not to be used as a means to post images of a pornographic or otherwise provocative nature, so please be mindful of the images that may appear on your battlestation. Please help to keep the thread relevant and safe to browse for everyone. Last year's Battlestations thread is here.

The tags say it all - looking at an upgrade to Haswell (specifically, i5-4670K), and have it down to one of three ASUS motherboards (all in the topic). Multi-GPU is not in the plans (too pricey still). Other than my system RAM, everything will lateral to it from what I have (GPU and sound are both PCI-E - no PCI cards are in my current setup - all drives are SATA). There is one possible wrinkle - my GTX550Ti is, as far as I know, not a so-called UEFI-ready model - will I have issues with the UEFI in any of the three motherboards?