Lenovo ThinkStation D20

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.

The Lenovo ThinkStation D20 is a specialized dual-CPU workstation for the engineering, scientific, and Hollywood crowds. It's the big weapon in the arsenal, made for your heavy-hitting users with mission-critical tasks. Two quad-core processors. Speedy 15,000 rpm hard drive. Lots of expansion room. Workstation-class everything. Has eSATA and FireWire. It's big. It's pricey. Could use USB 3.0.

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.

TextArticle

Posted in: Desktop,Lenovo