lenovo thinkstation p410
This single socket workstation is oriented towards modelling, but what else can it do?
| | PRICE £3,329 inc VAT company Lenovo WEBSITE www.lenovo.com l enovo acquired IBM’S personal computer business in 2005, and the company’s Thinkstation workstations still show the design heritage. The P410 is a single socket workstation. It may not have quite the custom design of Lenovo’s higher-end models, but components in the expansion slots and drive bays can readily be replaced by pressing a few plastic buttons. Our P410 sample came with an Intel Xeon E5 from the middle of the 1600 Series range. The E5-1650 v4 is a six core processor with a base 3.6GHZ clock speed and a 4GHZ Turbo mode. Hyper-threading is available, so the six real cores are shown as 12 virtual ones.
processing power
The processor is backed by a healthy 32GB of 2,400MHZ DDR4 SDRAM. This comes as four modules, which take up all four DIMM slots, so upgrades will necessitate replacement, but also take advantage of the processor’s quadchannel memory controller for maximum bandwidth.
This Thinkstation model supports up to NVIDIA Quadro M5000 graphics, but our sample came with the M4000, which boasts 1,664 CUDA cores and 8GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus, offering 192Gb/sec bandwidth. It can drive a 4K screen at 60Hz and incorporates four Displayport 1.2 connections.
plenty of room
Storage is the familiar combination of solid state and conventional hard disks. The SSD supplied is the fastest NVME M.2 variety, in the shape of a 512GB Samsung SM951 installed in a PCI Express slot. The hard disk is a 7,200rpm 4TB HGST Ultrastar 7K4000. A DVD rewriter and memory card reader are also installed, and there’s room for another 3.5 inch drive if you like.
The P410 is a decent all round workstation in terms of performance, but more oriented towards modelling. The rendering score in Maxon Cinebench R15 is 1,143, which is reasonable for a single socket system, but 10-core and multisocket alternatives go beyond this. The Cinebench R15 Opengl result of 143.13 is again decent, but not outstanding. Turning to Specviewperf 12.1, results are as expected.
Overall, the balance of components suits this application well, although the six core processor makes a decent stab at rendering, too. There’s generous storage and a standard three year warranty. All this means the P410 is a solid professional 3D workhorse.