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Used for: 1–3 months
Holds a steady clock instead of throttling forty minutes in
The chassis is deep and heavy to get onto a desk
Replaced a five-year-old workstation that had started throttling about forty minutes into anything serious, which meant every long job was really two short ones with a cooling break in the middle. This does not do that at all — it finds a level in the first ten minutes and stays there until the job is done, which has taken about a third off our turnaround.
Used for: 6–12 months
No throttling however long the job runs
Idle noise is not zero, just low
It holds full clocks for as long as you care to feed it work
Used for: 1–3 months
Every serviceable part reachable without tools
The case is the part I want to praise, which is not something I expected to write. Every drive is on a caddy you can reach without moving the machine, the memory is in the open once one shroud lifts, and there is not a screwdriver involved in any of it. On the work side, our largest scenes now open in one piece and stay open, and a render that used to be an overnight job comes back inside three hours. It is a big, heavy, plain grey box and every decision in it seems to have been made by someone who has had to fix one at four in the afternoon.
Used for: 1–3 months
Arrived with the certified driver already in place
We specified it around memory capacity and certified drivers rather than raw clock, because the application we run is fussy about both. It came with the right driver already in place, which saved a week of arguing, and the largest models we have go in whole. Six hours of solving and the temperatures sit flat, which is the whole reason to buy something like this.
Used for: 1–3 months
A lunchtime compile now takes eleven minutes
Under a long build it is the loudest thing in a shared studio
Bought to shorten a compile that had grown to the point where the team had started planning around it — start the build, go to lunch, hope. It now finishes in about eleven minutes, which has changed the shape of the working day more than any tool we have bought in years. The reservation is noise. At idle it is fine and in a room of its own it would be fine at any load, but ours shares a studio with two people editing audio, and under a long build it is clearly the loudest thing in there. It is a smooth noise rather than a whine, so it is liveable, but if quiet mattered as much as speed I would have looked harder at the case.
Used for: 1–3 months
Datasets sit in memory with room to spare
The drive layout is more awkward than the photos suggest
The memory is what it was bought for and the memory delivers: our biggest datasets sit resident with room to spare, and nothing has swapped to disk since it arrived. The drive layout is more awkward than it looks in the photographs though.
Used for: More than a year
Eighteen months of daily use without a single fault
The front filter needs washing monthly and is fiddly
A year and a half of daily use and it has not missed a beat, which at this level is the minimum you should expect and still worth saying. Long jobs hold their pace, the memory has never been the limit, and the bays took two more drives without any fuss. My one complaint is the front filter, which needs pulling and washing monthly in a studio and is fiddly enough that people put it off.
Used for: More than a year
Still as fast as the week it arrived
Takes two people to lift
A year on and it still holds full clocks
Used for: Less than a month
First week with it and the thing that stands out is not the speed, it is the consistency. The old machine was quick for ten minutes and then negotiable; this one does not appear to have a second gear because it never leaves the first. A test render that used to be a lunchtime job came back in twenty-two minutes, and the second and third runs came back in twenty-two minutes as well, though the fans are honest about what it is doing!