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RENDA PW-E7F Review

The new RENDA range from Overclockers shows potential with this capable frequency-enhanced Intel Core i7 workstation...

The new RENDA range from Overclockers shows potential with this capable frequency-enhanced Intel Core i7 workstation...

Product: RENDA PW-E7F

Company: Overclockers

Website: www.overclockers.co.uk

Overclockers, as its company name implies, is a company primarily focused on what has come to be known as the 'hardware enthusiast' community. But building quality PCs for those who love fast computing isn't such a leap from producing systems for professionals. Both demand high-quality components and careful construction. So Overclockers has now branched out into the workstation market with a new RENDA range of systems. The PW-E7F is our first look at RENDA, and it shows promise.

Overclockers has taken the now familiar route of supplying a 'frequency-enhanced' Core i7 with the PW-E7F. The processor in question is the range-topping Core i7-5960X. This runs at a nominal 3GHz and has a physical eight cores. But the frequency enhancement lifts this permanently to 4.2GHz across all cores, with an elaborate water-cooling system to keep temperatures under control. Intel Hyper-Threading turns the eight real cores into 16 virtual ones, so this system has both frequency and core count on its side.

The RENDA range doesn't stray notably from the penchant for big black chassis in the workstation market,
although this is a solid example of the genre

The Extreme edition

The Core i7 processor is the Extreme edition from Intel's latest Haswell Refresh, which is a tweak of the fifth-generation Haswell. So it supports DDR4 memory, and Overclockers has equipped the PW-E7F with 32GB of the 2,133MHz variety. This is arranged as four lots of 8GB, to take full advantage of the quad-channel architecture of Intel Haswell processors, and leaving four slots free for upgrade if and when required.

The frequency-enhanced Intel Core i7 processor, which runs at 4.2GHz, is kept in line with this hefty water-cooling system

The graphics are pretty high end, but Overclockers has taken the less typical choice of supplying an AMD FirePro instead of NVIDIA Quadro hardware. There's nothing particularly wrong with this decision, but at the moment NVIDIA has the lion's share of the professional market. The FirePro in question is the W8100, which sports a very healthy 2,560 Stream Processors and 8GB of GDDR5 memory, both of which put it more in the league of the Quadro K5200 than the K4200. With a 512-bit memory interface, this graphics card offers a whopping 320GB/sec of frame buffer bandwidth. It also sports four DisplayPort outputs, each capable of driving monitor resolutions of 4,096 x 2,160 with a DisplayPort 1.2 connection, making really massive video walls a possibility.

Overclockers has taken the less common choice of including an AMD FirePro W8100 rather than the usual
NVIDIA Quadro workstation fare

The storage provision is the now familiar combination of a solid state disk for operating system and applications, coupled with a regular mechanical hard disk for general data. The former is a reasonable if not excessive 256GB Samsung 850 Pro, while the latter is a similarly decent 2TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14, which should be fine for the intended 3D content creation tasks. There's no optical drive included, and no memory card reader built in either, which is a little surprising at this price.

However, where this system does not disappoint at all is in performance. The Maxon Cinebench R15 render score of 1717 is not far off the Lenovo P700 we reviewed recently, which had not one but two eight-core processors. So the Intel Extreme processor's extra clock speed is really paying off here. The Cinebench R15 OpenGL test tends to favor FirePros and this system managed a score of 183.21, which is one of the fastest we have seen – even quicker than the Scan 3XS GW-HTX35 with its £3,000 NVIDIA Quadro M6000.

The AMD FirePro W8100 sports four DisplayPort connections, each one supporting a 4K monitor, should you need massive amounts of desktop real estate

The SPECviewperf 12 results are a little more varied, but still very good. Comparing the W8100 to the M6000 in these tests wouldn't really be appropriate, but the results were somewhere between what a Quadro K4200 and a K5200 would achieve, depending on the viewset – and the latter is a much more expensive card. The maya-04 score of 70.84 is one of the fastest we've ever seen, with only Fujitsu's AMD FirePro W9100-equipped CELSIUS M740 Power nudging slightly ahead. This will be an excellent system for 3D content creation with Maya. The showcase-01 result of 55.83 was only bettered by the M6000-wielding Scan and the Fujitsu. The FirePro W8100's 8GB of GDDR5 certainly shows benefits in a number of areas compared to a Quadro K4200, and there won't be any applications that give it trouble. With 87.7 in the SolidWorks sw-03 viewset, this will be a great system for product design too. Overall, this will be an excellent modeling and design system where performance is concerned.

Most of the cables, and some of the water-cooling pipe work, has been routed underneath the motherboard, leaving a neat and spacious interior

A promising start

The numbers for the RENDA PW-E7F show promise for this new workstation brand. What we can't easily test is how well the company will be able to cope with the very specialized support required by the professional 3D user. However, the warranty is good, lasting five years for labor, although components are guaranteed for just three of those years. The price of slightly over £4,000 inc VAT is a little on the premium side for the specification, but not by enough to be a concern. Overall, this is a great debut for the RENDA range from Overclockers.

Score (out of 5): 4

Price: £4,060.93 inc VAT

Release date: Now

Key features:

- 3GHz Intel Core i7-5960X running at 4.2GHz
- 32GB 2133MHz DDR4 SDRAM
- AMD FirePro W8100 graphics with 8GB GDDR5 memory
- 256GB Samsung 850 Pro SATA solid state disk
- 2TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 SATA 7200rpm hard disk
- Windows 8.1 Professional 64-bit
- Warranty: 5 years, 3 years collect and return plus 2 years labour

CPU benchmarks:

Maxon Cinebench R15: 1.717


Graphics benchmarks:

Maxon Cinebench R15: 183.21

SPECviewperf 12:

Related links

Head to Overclockers to see what else they offer
Check out James Morris' site for more tech
Grab a copy of Beginner's Guide to Character Creation in Maya

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