by
Ben Funk
—
Friday, April 02, 2021, 10:20 AM EDT
Lenovo ThinkStation P620: Thermal and Acoustic Performance, Conclusions
We expected that the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 would put up some truly monumental scores on both the CPU and GPU sides of the performance coin. However, the Threadripper PRO 3995WX has a 280 W TDP, and the Quadro RTX 6000 has a 295 W thermal budget of its own. Combined, that's a ton of potential heat to clear away. The ThinkStation P620's chassis has an open honeycomb mesh pattern that should do well for airflow. If you recall from our intro, the system has a relatively meager 92 millimeter exhaust fan and the CPU cooler has just a pair of 80 millimeter fans. Was the system up to the task? And how loud would it get?
Sample noise reading from the Lenovo ThinkStation P620
We took all of our sound measurements approximately 12" from the front of that mesh open front panel. To start, the ThinkStation P620 is pretty tame when idle. Our trusty meter only registered around 35 to 36 dBA when the system was totally at rest. That's a fair amount above the 30 dBA sound floor in our office and it's a little louder than a carefully tuned enthusiast system, but most enthusiast systems don't have 64 cores and nearly 300 W graphics cards. All things considered, that's pretty quiet in our books. Under load, the system understandably got much louder -- more on that in a just a bit.
Our Kill-A-Watt captured power consumed during various scenarios
Once we had a baseline, it was time to turn up the pressure bit by bit. We started with a single-threaded Cinebench test. We tried the default multi-threaded test, but that completes in just a few seconds, so for our multi-threaded load we turned to SiSoft SANDRA 2020's Processor Mathematics test. For our graphics-only tests we ran LuxMark's LuxBall benchmark. And then finally, we ran a torture test of SANDRA 2020 and LuxMark together to completely bring the system to its knees. Along the way, we measured noise, temperatures, and power draw across those five scenarios, so let's take a look at how the ThinkStation P620 took the pressure.
We want to note that while yes, there are CPU and GPU loads that can force these components to use more power, such as Prime95's Small FFT torture test or Furmark, those tests don't generally reflect the real-world scenarios where the ThinkStation will be used. We stuck to the kinds of operations that heavy-duty workstations would perform on the GPU side, while giving the CPU a sustained load and not inflicting a power virus upon it.
The temperatures were always under control. In fact, the CPU under an all-core torture test never hit 85 degrees Celsius. Our room temperature was 68 degrees Fahrenheit, or an even 20 Celsius, so we're looking at CPU temperature deltas just over 60 degrees Celsius. The GPU was similarly unfazed by the load, as it barely touched 80°C.
What's remarkable is that neither one of them seemed to affect the other all that much while both were running all out at the same time. The Quadro RTX 6000 has a single blower-style fan that pulls air from below and directs it right out the back of the case, and the case has a very open airflow pattern, so the CPU doesn't resort to pulling air heated by the back of the graphics card.
Considering the temperatures we recorded in each scenario, noise isn't really a surprise considering the size and rotational speeds for each of the cooling fans. At idle, the ThinkStation P620 is pretty quiet, but once we the CPU gets working hard, fans speed up considerably and the noise output is pretty loud.
The P620 is not a workstation we'd want to use on top of a desk, but subjectively, the noise character isn't troublesome. There's no whining or squeal, just three high-speed fans pushing a lot of air. Underneath a desk, this becomes much less noticeable, since the 1.5" MDF of our test bench poses a significant barrier.
Unsurprising from a 64-core processor that can run at speeds of up to 4.2 GHz, there's a lot of draw under the all-core test. The same can be said for what was NVIDIA's largest Turing-based GPU. It's no surprise that an either/or scenario draws more than 360 and 410 Watts of power, respectively, for each component. Of course, the total draw from the wall isn't a straight 770 Watts because there are components that draw power at all times.
Still, drawing 640 Watts while completely under load is nothing to sneeze at. There's a ton of powerful hardware tucked away inside the ThinkStation P620, and it needs plenty of juice to do its work. The 1000 W 80-Plus certified power supply has certainly earned its keep, since the sweet spot at the top of the efficiency curve tends to be when the power supply is running at 40-60 percent of its capacity. If we assume that 92% efficiency rating from Lenovo hits that point, the system is likely pulling right at 600 W for itself, towards the upper part of that curve.
Lenovo ThinkStation P620 - The Review Verdict
There's no doubt about it: Lenovo created a machine for heavy duty lifting with the ThinkStation P620. The AMD Threadripper PRO CPU, support for registered ECC memory, and NVIDIA Quadro graphics options with their accompanying ISV certifications are exactly what professional users need to make so much of the media we consume. Try as we might, we couldn't find a way that the company skimped out in any area of the build, from the heavy-duty case materials to the power supply driving everything under the hood.
From a performance standpoint, the Lenovo workstation has as much horsepower as anybody could reasonably expect. The Threadripper PRO 3995WX in our review unit had 128 hardware threads for any parallel task from rendering to video work, and single-threaded performance is still solid as evidenced by our single-threaded workloads. From a GPU standpoint, NVIDIA's Quadro RTX 6000 proved to be no slouch, pumping out pixels in static scenes and incredibly high frame rates in all of the real-time rendering tests.
Our test system wasn't even totally maxed out, as it had a second M.2 slot free and six empty DIMM slots. As fast as the Threadripper PRO 3995WX was in all of our CPU tests, there's a little more room for added performance if the task is memory bandwidth sensitive. Only two of the eight memory channels were served by its 2 x 16 GB RAM configuration. The system can swallow half a terabyte of registered ECC memory if need be. And thanks to PCI Express cards, it can handle upwards of ten M.2 NVMe SSDs, too.
Pricing is about what we would expect given the professional target market and high-powered gear. The base system has a 12-core, 24-thread Threadripper PRO 3945WX, 16 GB of registered ECC memory, a 256 GB NVMe SSD, and Quadro P620 graphics for $2,099. The optical drive and all-in-one memory reader from our review unit is gone at that price, too. The P620 has 512 CUDA cores based on the Pascal architecture, so the closest comparison is somewhere between a GeForce GT 1030 and GeForce GTX 1050. The CPU isn't that far off a Ryzen 9 3900X, but it has four memory channels to satisfy and much more PCI Express bandwidth. That connectivity can be well worth the added cost all by itself, depending on your needs.
As configured, our 64-core workstation with an AMD Threadripper PRO 3995WX, 32 GB of Registered ECC memory, 512 GB of solid state storage, and an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 graphics card will set you back just over $12,000. Frankly, if time is money and a workstation pro can utilize this kind of horsepower and throughput a big chunk of the time, it's probably worth every penny. Lenovo offers several other upgrades beyond this config, including the aforementioned 512 GB of memory, a pair of Volta-based 32 GB Quadro GV100 GPUs, and tons of storage.
Lenovo's ThinkStation P620 is a workhorse of a workstation for professional users who know what to do with all of its production-ready design and content creation app certifications. With all the CPU horsepower AMD can stuff into a single socket and this system's 3D rendering and GPGPU prowess, we have no doubt that pros who earn a living with desktop workstations as a critical tools for their everyday workflow, will see value despite the price tag the P620 commands. Obviously, the potential clientele for this system is relatively niche', but if you find yourself in demographic of mission-critical user, the ThinkStation P620 may just be what you're looking for.
