
Warranty: 1 Year — effortless warranty claims with UK-wide coverage. Learn more
Rate this product — your experience helps other buyers.
Used for: More than a year
Still quick enough that nobody has asked for a newer one
You will want more storage than you think you do
Two years of continuous use and not one fault
Used for: 3–6 months
It has never once been the reason a deadline moved
Does the heavy lifting for four of us over the network and has never grumbled about any of it!
Used for: More than a year
Bought for point cloud work at a survey firm, where registering a day of scans used to be an overnight job. Now it is finished before anyone leaves the building. A year and a half on, it has not missed a single deadline.
Used for: 6–12 months
Ours does not sit under anybody's desk. It went into the rack room with the servers and the three people who use it come in over a remote session, which is the sensible arrangement for a machine that gets this loud when it is working hard. In an office it would drive people mad. In a room with air conditioning and a closed door it is exactly right. The upside nobody mentions is that a machine like this is easier to share than to own. It is genuinely busy about four hours a day, and the rest of the time somebody else's job has it.
Used for: 3–6 months
Takes a second card without any rearranging inside
The reason we chose this chassis over something cheaper was headroom for a second card, and that has turned out to be the right call. Dropping one in took ten minutes, no shuffling of cables, no wondering whether the power supply would cope. What surprised me is how little difference it made to the noise. Two cards under load and it is still quieter than the single-card machine it replaced, which sat in the corner sounding like a hairdryer. Five months in and the only thing I have touched since is the dust filter!
Used for: More than a year
An IT department bought six of these for the design team and I have had one since the start. In eighteen months the only ticket raised against any of them was a monitor cable that had worked loose.
Used for: Less than a month
Everything about the inside is designed to be opened
We took delivery of six and the first thing to say is that nobody warned us about the weight. Getting them out of the boxes and onto desks took two of us and most of a morning, and one of them is on the first floor, which I will not be repeating. With no operating system on them the opening day was imaging rather than working. That is our own choice and I would not have it any other way, but if you are ordering one expecting to switch it on and start, plan the day differently. Once they were running the difference was immediate. The team's models open in seconds instead of in the time it takes to make a drink, and the office has not got any louder for having six more machines in it. Four stars only because that opening week was pure logistics.
Used for: Less than a month
On-site warranty was the reason it beat the self-build quote
A bare machine means a day of imaging before anyone can work
The whole argument for buying rather than building came down to who fixes it when it stops. I can put the same specification together for less, but I cannot get an engineer into the building the next morning. First fortnight has been faultless, so the argument stays theoretical.
Used for: 1–3 months
Chews through overnight simulations without breaking sweat
Fitting the second drive means removing more of the machine than it should
Adding storage was more of a job than the marketing photographs suggest. Two bays were already populated and getting at the empty ones meant lifting out a shroud and unclipping a cable I was not confident about. Half an hour in the end, no harm done, but I have been building machines for a long time and would not call it tool-free. Everything else is exactly as hoped. It sits under a desk, it is quiet at idle, and the long jobs finish when they said they would.
Used for: More than a year
Runs every night without anyone thinking about it
Our modelling package will certify only a handful of cards, and that list is the entire reason this machine is in the building rather than something assembled from parts. When a simulation misbehaves, the vendor cannot point at the hardware and shrug. Eighteen months on, it has run every night without complaint, and the one time a driver update caused trouble there was an older certified version to fall back on. Dull, which is exactly what you want from something this expensive.