Lenovo ThinkStation D20

The Lenovo ThinkStation D20 is one of those systems that you know you will need. Are you building components for weapons systems that directly related to national defense? Are you in the editing and mastering stage of a $250 million Hollywood movie? Do you need to produce blueprints for an eight-lane automobile bridge spanning a major river? If you answer yes to one of these, you are probably in the market for a workstation desktop like the D20. If your job is eliminating pimples from a photo of a Kardashian, this system is overkill.

Design and Features
The D20 is a full-sized professional grade workstation, and it probably won't win any beauty awards. It's a humungous black metal and plastic tower, about 17 by 8 by 24 inches (HWD), so you'll have to clear up a bunch of space either under or on top of your work surface for the system. The D20 has a two-inch tall handle on the top, which will help your IT move the system around if necessary. The front panel is perforated with a hexagonal pattern, in order to aid airflow through the system. The tower is totally air-cooled, which reduces complexity over a liquid-cooled system. What's notable is even though the system is air-cooled, it is very quiet during use. The system's fans will only spin up fast during the boot process and if the CPU or GPU is really taxed. You'd think that a dual-CPU system would be loud because of the extra cooling fans, but during most work sessions the system was as quiet as a run-of-the-mill business desktop PC.

The system's massive size has a purpose: It can accommodate plenty of upgrades. The system we reviewed came with a 450GB 15,000rpm SAS drive, plus you can add up to four more SAS or SATA hard drives. The system can connect to industry-standard FireWire 400 and eSATA external drives in case you're dealing with hand-transported data. The system has a 2GB Nvidia Quadro graphics card in it, but you can add one more, plus another lower-end graphics card for multi-monitor support (there are two PCIe x16 slots, but one is only wired for PCIe x4). There's also space for another optical drive, plus nine memory DIMM slots. The system we reviewed came with 12GB of memory, but the system can handle 48GB total. Essentially, this system is overbuilt for most people who aren't aerospace engineers, trying to map the human genome, or designing bridges for government contractors.

The system is ISV certified to work with a plethora of software packages, including packages like AutoCad and PRO/Engineer. These certifications (and the underlying hardware and drivers) are important, since the users of a system like this may be designing the leading edge of an airplane wing or a strut on a bridge being built over a canyon. If you get an error on an ultra-high end gaming system you might have a missed frame while shooting an enemy in a virtual world. If a pro workstation user has an undetected error on a project, it could lead to a bus crashing into a canyon. This is one of the many reasons why professional workstations are more expensive than high-end consumer desktops.

Performance
The ThinkStation D20 exudes high-end performance. Its two Xeon processors, 12GB of memory, SAS hard drive, and Quadro 4000 graphics card mean that it will take any task you ask of it, and finish it quickly. The "X" in the X5687 processor's model number means that is can dynamically overclock itself like other Intel processors. The D20 finishes the Handbrake video encode test in a quick 1:19 and the Photoshop CS5 test in 3:09. This is over a minute faster than the last two dual-CPU workstations we've tested, the Editors' Choice?winning Lenovo ThinkStation C20 ($4,618 direct, 4 stars) and Apple Mac Pro ($3,499 list, 3.5 stars). Both workstations use "e" class Xeons that don't have Turbo. The wins extend to Cinebench R11.5, a simulation of 3D rendering in software (which is multi-core friendly). The D20 has the highest 12.65 score, compared to the 9.53 for the C20 and 8.62 for the Mac Pro. Granted, the Mac Pro uses a slower Xeon processor and is almost two years old at this point, but the Mac Pro is still being sold in this exact configuration. Remember what I said about gaming PCs? Well, the EC-winning Falcon Northwest Mach V ($6,899 direct, 4.5 stars) is able to perform better than the workstations shown here, but then again none of its components are ISV certified. The Falcon is faster than the D20, but it's not that much faster. You can't discount the Falcon's consumer nature. Think of the Falcon as a speed demon that you bring out to play, and the Lenovo as a precision instrument that also happens to be fast.

The Lenovo ThinkStation D20 is an interesting beast. It's something you buy to fulfill a specific need, rather than a system you can choose among a lineup. The closest system to the D20 in scope that we've seen recently is the Apple Mac Pro. Both systems are dual CPU, with plenty of internal expansion room. The D20 is quite a bit faster, but that's no surprise as the D20 has a faster clocked processor with Turbo capabilities. While that Mac Pro is a good choice for a user in a Mac environment, if your business has standardized on Windows you really want to get a Windows workstation. For general workstation and high-end business tasks like photo and video editing, the current workstation Editors' Choice HP Z210 Small Form Factor Workstation ($2,173 direct, 4 stars) has a better price/performance ratio, but the Z210 is a single-CPU system and isn't expandable like the D20. The D20 is really made for the scientific/engineering/movie mastering crowds, so it's more of a case where you know that you need it. In that case, the D20 will serve you and your users well.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Lenovo ThinkStation D20 with several other desktops and workstations side by side.

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