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Lenovo ThinkStation P620 Review: A Vehicle for Threadripper Pro

68 points by neogodless 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jrockway 6y ago
Interesting to me is Lenovo's decision to include cooling fans on the RAM. If you read the enthusiast forums, it's something that most everyone makes fun of, but something I've always wondered about myself. My Threadripper build initially had pretty hot memory, because there was no way to get airflow to the "back" half (Lenovo arranges the memory horizontally, but they're vertical on my board). Eventually I improved temps by mounting my GPU "upright" (i.e. attached a a riser with the PCI-E fingers facing down), and this gave the bottom intake fans some way to get cold air over the RAM in the back. But, what I've learned from this is that when an OEM works closely with AMD, they actively cool the RAM. Very interesting.
- tedunangst 6y ago
  Is the thinkstation rated for high(ish) temp operation?
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >Interesting to me is Lenovo's decision to include cooling fans on the RAM. IIRC, these workstations are made for VFX houses where they'll probably render scenes nearly 24/7, weekends included, so Lenovo didn't fuck around with the cooling for such a demanding use case. If you're on a crunch to finish that epic 30 second shot worth six-figures for that upcoming Hollywood blockbuster then you want the best pro-grade tools you can get that you can leave running for days and sleep soundly knowing they'll do their job and not hang up or throttle. Any major downtime in this racket is worth more than that workstation. >If you read the enthusiast forums, it's something that most everyone makes fun of True, because most "enthusiasts" on forums are just well-off gamers or posers showing off their expensive setups for upvotes, that are just used 2-6 hours a day for video games and scrolling through reddit instead of 24/7 workloads responsible for a business's revenue stream.
  - willis936 6y ago
    The VRMs are more important. They have a real chance of thermal runaway, consistently are the hottest component in any system, and are one of the most common elements to fail. As far as I can tell from the images, the P620 VRMs are given a generous heatsink with good airflow. Active cooling on the RAM? Sure, why not? It won’t hurt. It won’t really help either, assuming the case has acceptable airflow.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > these workstations are made for VFX houses where they'll probably render scenes nearly 24/7, weekends included They render VFX on employee workstations? Why don't they render in a data centre with proper cooling and things? Must make the offices very hot!
    - StillBored 6y ago
      Well at least in the past they did. For example: https://www.wsj.com/video/lucasfilm-data-center-and-the-real-death-star/FAFAA92B-815A-45A2-ACA5-39336EEF8300.html https://www.wsj.com/video/lucasfilm-data-center-and-the-real...
    - mywittyname 6y ago
      Not a VFX worker, but I did CAD simulations for a while (which uses very similar equipment, Xeons, Quadros, 128+GB ram) and we would definitely run tasks like test suites over the weekend on our personal workstations because there was no guarantee that the cluster we used for testing would ever actually run your workloads. This was especially true when releases were close.
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      You use clusters to render a whole/movie scene when it's finished or in various stages of completion to show to the art directors but you still need powerful workstations to preview your own changes to the scene as you work on it. Plus, clusters aren't always at your disposal and usually have schedules when you can book them according to priority and not all workflow can be automated and pipelined to fit a cluster. VFX work is not just 3D modelling where you click Render and boom, 2 days later, your scene it's ready to be put on film. There's tons of tasks you need to do pre- and post- production like layout, rigging, motion capture, rotoscoping, comping, etc. and most of these tasks are done manually on the artist's workstation. I'm sure big houses like ILM, Pixar, Weta, Disney have the money and technical chops to engineer and maintain their own in-house rendering cluster infrastructure but small firms don't and rely on beefy workstations like this to render their project over multiple days.
Jonnax 6y ago
I'm still amazed that Intel doesn't have anything that can compete with AMD's 64 core workstation processor. Have they got PCIe Gen 4 yet?
- SteveNuts 6y ago
  It seems like Intel is skipping PCIe-4 altogether, and just moving on to 5
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Intel has been shipping pcie 4 CPUs since Q3 last year, but not on workstations. Rocket Lake parts, supposedly to be released soon, will have pcie 4. Presumably future workstations will be based on Ice Lake microarchitecture, and these also have pcie 4, but they also don't exist yet.
mstipetic 6y ago
A bit off topic but I got annoyed by laptops and bought a used Lenovo ThinkCenter tower for a few hundred euros and couldn't be happier. They're really well made, with high end components (i7 7700, 32GB ECC), and after I've stuck a graphics card in it I'm sure I'm set for years to come. I'm actually surprised how incremental the progress was over the last decade, with regards to CPUs and to a lesser extent GPUs. I'd strongly suggest trying to reuse older hardware instead of spending $1000+ on new one
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >I'm actually surprised how incremental the progress was over the last decade I think you're a bit over-exaggerating here as it really depends on what you do with your PC and where you're coming from. If you've only been running Intel this whole time and all you do is light workloads then you won't notice much progress since they haven't made much, but if do CPU demanding tasks and were to try a Ryzen 3xxx/4xxx, or better yet, a 5xxx, you'll notice a huge leap forward (if you could find one in stock, that is). However, your "new" 7700 is a bit old in the tooth now and, despite Intel's lack of major progress, it will still be left in the dust by a newer 10th/11th gen chip. My old faithful Intel Q6600 still serves my parents just fine after 14 years of age, but I'm not gonna pretend it isn't slow by today's standards on the modern bloated web and with all the electron crap.
  - mstipetic 6y ago
    For sure, but for let's say gaming purposes a computer that was top of the line 5 or so years ago is still completely fine. I haven't been paying much attention as I was just buying a macbook for the last 10 years, but I remember a time when I was younger and a 2 year old computer was worthless.
    - zerocrates 6y ago
      Gaming also has its own different problems and pressures. For one, it's rarely a great move to make something that's far beyond the capabilities of the current-gen consoles since so many things will launch on them also. Even the "Pro" variants of this last generation were about 5 years ago by now. You'd expect as the current console generation actually gets off the ground to start seeing more demanding upper settings, and eventually more demanding minimums.
jeffbee 6y ago
Would have been cool to see it go head-to-head with the HP z8 G4. The internal construction of the Lenovo is a little disappointing considering the price point. HP's internal air baffling is a lot more thought-out. For this price from HP you get the same GPU, 56 cores, 192GB of memory, and 16 TB of SSDs with 6 m.2 slots left open, and thunderbolt which the Lenovo lacks.
CobaltFire 6y ago
I bought one of these and after using it for about a week I’m absolutely in love. I kept the 3945WX (and the rest of the base spec), added a W5700 and a second 10GbE card, then installed an AX200/BT5.1 card, second SSD, and three more DIMMs (64GB total) when it got here. Outstanding machine for the price if you can get it on discount!
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, what do you use it for, if I may ask?
  - CobaltFire 6y ago
    Honestly I was just looking to build a new PC, and this ended up cheaper (can't quote the exact price, but after the upfitting it was less than $2500 taxed and delivered) and easier than dealing with scalpers when a friend found he could (legally) offer me a discount through his company. My home PC has very little to do with my day job at this time, so I acknowledge it's complete overkill for that. However, I'm looking at needing to transition careers in a couple of years and so this will likely be used as a homelab in a box. I also game, dabble in coding (playing with a game idea in Unity right now), etc.
  - AdrianB1 6y ago
    Not the OP, but I was looking to buy a couple of these for my team for database code optimization work. I have an older TR build with 128 GB or RAM, 3x nVME, 2xSSD and 3xHDD (3 tiers of storage performance) built for about $3000, so we can run almost any database from production on it and tune the code and indexes. With 8 memory channels we can go to 256GB of cheap UDIMM (32GB each) instead of using expensive high density RDIMM or LRDIMM. Also the number of PCIe connections allow for enough nVME drives, something a desktop CPU - AMD or Intel - cannot do. From my limited perspective, the 2 benefits of TR over Ryzen at low CPU count are the PCIe lanes and memory channels and slots. If you need a high CPU count then there is no other choice but TR.
    - CobaltFire 6y ago
UncleOxidant 6y ago
Holy moley, $35K (after discount) for the top of the line box. Maybe I'll look around for a used one of those in about 10 years.
- jrockway 6y ago
  That build includes $18,000 worth of graphics cards. If you need it, you need it, and there's no competition in that space, so it's expensive. But, if you aren't doing whatever GV100s are good at (machine learning? raytracing?) then you can probably get a C++ compilation rig and web browser with 64 cores for ~$10,000. (I suppose that's another "if you need it, you need it" case. But at least more straightforward to the software engineers among us -- if you have more than 64 C++ files to compile... the 64 core chip can be useful. Even "go test ./..." in a moderately-sized project uses all 32 of my non-pro threadripper cores. Briefly. Not doing as much work as the C++ compiler. :)
lostmsu 6y ago
Too bad they don't seem to offer RTX 3XXX GPU options.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Those are mobile GPUs. There's nothing in their workstation line card with a 3000 name.
- tanelpoder 6y ago
  I bought a RTX 3090 separately and it works in my P620 just fine.
  - lostmsu 6y ago
    Part of buying a workstation with an online configurator is that you don't have to assemble it yourself.
    - tanelpoder 6y ago
      Yup, I totally get it. I had to tinker with power cables (the EVGA RTX 3090 required 3 x 8 pin power connectors). Also, cooling - I couldn’t get my hands on a blower-style RTX card, so the GPU just dumps its heat inside the chassis. I also bought cheap “eBay memory” instead of the more expensive Lenovo offering and had to reseat DIMMs a few times to stop having ECC errors (the memory scrubbing feature is nice).
jojobas 6y ago
As far as I understand, the only Lenovo-specific item in the build is the motherboard, still based on a generic chipset. Is there any benefit compared to building from individually purchased components?
- wmf 6y ago
  These components weren't supposed to be available separately, although that's changing.
  - jojobas 6y ago
    Which components are these? Everything seems to be easy to come by.
    - notyourday 6y ago
      CPUs
      - jojobas 6y ago
        Right, should be on the shelf in a month or so. I wonder what kind of deal made these 5 months of Lenovo exclusivity worthwhile for AMD.
        notyourday 6y ago
        I was actually shocked. I have friends in a biz high in the food chain so I typically can get a small number of what they get at cost + pay us for shipping. Sometime in October a bug bit me and I decided I was going to build myself a kick ass workstation to replace my aging 4790k and a server for VMs/containers. I did all the specs and build outs, including figuring out how I was going to change my "office" at home to accommodate additional gear. Imagine my surprise when my contacts said "Yeah, that's not happening. We can't get any."
        junar 6y ago
        I wouldn't count on it, the motherboards are also currently catered towards system integrators. > The vendor, when asked about on-shelf availability, said that they don't particularly plan on doing a full retail packaging, but should AMD push the TR Pro CPUs into the consumer channel, they will prepare the appropriate boxing. In that light, as it stands, it looks like it will depend on AMD to decide if they want to enable the regular consumer retail channel. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16396/the-amd-wrx80-chipset-a-few-boards-for-3rd-gen-threadripper-pro https://www.anandtech.com/show/16396/the-amd-wrx80-chipset-a...
offtop5 6y ago
>*Current Februrary Offer for 42% Discount on Direct Sales This is the one thing I hate about Lenovo. Just show me the price , creating MEGA sales to try and entice me into buying isn't cool
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
walrus01 6y ago
Finally, something I can encode AV1 video on at 1:1 realtime. Too bad I can't afford it.

68 points by neogodless 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Interesting to me is Lenovo's decision to include cooling fans on the RAM. If you read the enthusiast forums, it's something that most everyone makes fun of, but something I've always wondered about myself. My Threadripper build initially had pretty hot memory, because there was no way to get airflow to the "back" half (Lenovo arranges the memory horizontally, but they're vertical on my board). Eventually I improved temps by mounting my GPU "upright" (i.e. attached a a riser with the PCI-E fingers facing down), and this gave the bottom intake fans some way to get cold air over the RAM in the back. But, what I've learned from this is that when an OEM works closely with AMD, they actively cool the RAM. Very interesting.

tedunangst 6y ago
Is the thinkstation rated for high(ish) temp operation?
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>Interesting to me is Lenovo's decision to include cooling fans on the RAM. IIRC, these workstations are made for VFX houses where they'll probably render scenes nearly 24/7, weekends included, so Lenovo didn't fuck around with the cooling for such a demanding use case. If you're on a crunch to finish that epic 30 second shot worth six-figures for that upcoming Hollywood blockbuster then you want the best pro-grade tools you can get that you can leave running for days and sleep soundly knowing they'll do their job and not hang up or throttle. Any major downtime in this racket is worth more than that workstation. >If you read the enthusiast forums, it's something that most everyone makes fun of True, because most "enthusiasts" on forums are just well-off gamers or posers showing off their expensive setups for upvotes, that are just used 2-6 hours a day for video games and scrolling through reddit instead of 24/7 workloads responsible for a business's revenue stream.
- willis936 6y ago
  The VRMs are more important. They have a real chance of thermal runaway, consistently are the hottest component in any system, and are one of the most common elements to fail. As far as I can tell from the images, the P620 VRMs are given a generous heatsink with good airflow. Active cooling on the RAM? Sure, why not? It won’t hurt. It won’t really help either, assuming the case has acceptable airflow.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > these workstations are made for VFX houses where they'll probably render scenes nearly 24/7, weekends included They render VFX on employee workstations? Why don't they render in a data centre with proper cooling and things? Must make the offices very hot!
  - StillBored 6y ago
    Well at least in the past they did. For example: https://www.wsj.com/video/lucasfilm-data-center-and-the-real-death-star/FAFAA92B-815A-45A2-ACA5-39336EEF8300.html https://www.wsj.com/video/lucasfilm-data-center-and-the-real...
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    Not a VFX worker, but I did CAD simulations for a while (which uses very similar equipment, Xeons, Quadros, 128+GB ram) and we would definitely run tasks like test suites over the weekend on our personal workstations because there was no guarantee that the cluster we used for testing would ever actually run your workloads. This was especially true when releases were close.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    You use clusters to render a whole/movie scene when it's finished or in various stages of completion to show to the art directors but you still need powerful workstations to preview your own changes to the scene as you work on it. Plus, clusters aren't always at your disposal and usually have schedules when you can book them according to priority and not all workflow can be automated and pipelined to fit a cluster. VFX work is not just 3D modelling where you click Render and boom, 2 days later, your scene it's ready to be put on film. There's tons of tasks you need to do pre- and post- production like layout, rigging, motion capture, rotoscoping, comping, etc. and most of these tasks are done manually on the artist's workstation. I'm sure big houses like ILM, Pixar, Weta, Disney have the money and technical chops to engineer and maintain their own in-house rendering cluster infrastructure but small firms don't and rely on beefy workstations like this to render their project over multiple days.

Jonnax 6y ago

I'm still amazed that Intel doesn't have anything that can compete with AMD's 64 core workstation processor. Have they got PCIe Gen 4 yet?

SteveNuts 6y ago
It seems like Intel is skipping PCIe-4 altogether, and just moving on to 5
jeffbee 6y ago
Intel has been shipping pcie 4 CPUs since Q3 last year, but not on workstations. Rocket Lake parts, supposedly to be released soon, will have pcie 4. Presumably future workstations will be based on Ice Lake microarchitecture, and these also have pcie 4, but they also don't exist yet.

mstipetic 6y ago

A bit off topic but I got annoyed by laptops and bought a used Lenovo ThinkCenter tower for a few hundred euros and couldn't be happier. They're really well made, with high end components (i7 7700, 32GB ECC), and after I've stuck a graphics card in it I'm sure I'm set for years to come. I'm actually surprised how incremental the progress was over the last decade, with regards to CPUs and to a lesser extent GPUs. I'd strongly suggest trying to reuse older hardware instead of spending $1000+ on new one

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>I'm actually surprised how incremental the progress was over the last decade I think you're a bit over-exaggerating here as it really depends on what you do with your PC and where you're coming from. If you've only been running Intel this whole time and all you do is light workloads then you won't notice much progress since they haven't made much, but if do CPU demanding tasks and were to try a Ryzen 3xxx/4xxx, or better yet, a 5xxx, you'll notice a huge leap forward (if you could find one in stock, that is). However, your "new" 7700 is a bit old in the tooth now and, despite Intel's lack of major progress, it will still be left in the dust by a newer 10th/11th gen chip. My old faithful Intel Q6600 still serves my parents just fine after 14 years of age, but I'm not gonna pretend it isn't slow by today's standards on the modern bloated web and with all the electron crap.
- mstipetic 6y ago
  For sure, but for let's say gaming purposes a computer that was top of the line 5 or so years ago is still completely fine. I haven't been paying much attention as I was just buying a macbook for the last 10 years, but I remember a time when I was younger and a 2 year old computer was worthless.
  - zerocrates 6y ago
    Gaming also has its own different problems and pressures. For one, it's rarely a great move to make something that's far beyond the capabilities of the current-gen consoles since so many things will launch on them also. Even the "Pro" variants of this last generation were about 5 years ago by now. You'd expect as the current console generation actually gets off the ground to start seeing more demanding upper settings, and eventually more demanding minimums.

jeffbee 6y ago

Would have been cool to see it go head-to-head with the HP z8 G4. The internal construction of the Lenovo is a little disappointing considering the price point. HP's internal air baffling is a lot more thought-out. For this price from HP you get the same GPU, 56 cores, 192GB of memory, and 16 TB of SSDs with 6 m.2 slots left open, and thunderbolt which the Lenovo lacks.

CobaltFire 6y ago

I bought one of these and after using it for about a week I’m absolutely in love. I kept the 3945WX (and the rest of the base spec), added a W5700 and a second 10GbE card, then installed an AX200/BT5.1 card, second SSD, and three more DIMMs (64GB total) when it got here. Outstanding machine for the price if you can get it on discount!

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
Out of curiosity, what do you use it for, if I may ask?
- CobaltFire 6y ago
  Honestly I was just looking to build a new PC, and this ended up cheaper (can't quote the exact price, but after the upfitting it was less than $2500 taxed and delivered) and easier than dealing with scalpers when a friend found he could (legally) offer me a discount through his company. My home PC has very little to do with my day job at this time, so I acknowledge it's complete overkill for that. However, I'm looking at needing to transition careers in a couple of years and so this will likely be used as a homelab in a box. I also game, dabble in coding (playing with a game idea in Unity right now), etc.
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  Not the OP, but I was looking to buy a couple of these for my team for database code optimization work. I have an older TR build with 128 GB or RAM, 3x nVME, 2xSSD and 3xHDD (3 tiers of storage performance) built for about $3000, so we can run almost any database from production on it and tune the code and indexes. With 8 memory channels we can go to 256GB of cheap UDIMM (32GB each) instead of using expensive high density RDIMM or LRDIMM. Also the number of PCIe connections allow for enough nVME drives, something a desktop CPU - AMD or Intel - cannot do. From my limited perspective, the 2 benefits of TR over Ryzen at low CPU count are the PCIe lanes and memory channels and slots. If you need a high CPU count then there is no other choice but TR.
  - CobaltFire 6y ago

UncleOxidant 6y ago

Holy moley, $35K (after discount) for the top of the line box. Maybe I'll look around for a used one of those in about 10 years.

jrockway 6y ago
That build includes $18,000 worth of graphics cards. If you need it, you need it, and there's no competition in that space, so it's expensive. But, if you aren't doing whatever GV100s are good at (machine learning? raytracing?) then you can probably get a C++ compilation rig and web browser with 64 cores for ~$10,000. (I suppose that's another "if you need it, you need it" case. But at least more straightforward to the software engineers among us -- if you have more than 64 C++ files to compile... the 64 core chip can be useful. Even "go test ./..." in a moderately-sized project uses all 32 of my non-pro threadripper cores. Briefly. Not doing as much work as the C++ compiler. :)

lostmsu 6y ago

Too bad they don't seem to offer RTX 3XXX GPU options.

jeffbee 6y ago
Those are mobile GPUs. There's nothing in their workstation line card with a 3000 name.
tanelpoder 6y ago
I bought a RTX 3090 separately and it works in my P620 just fine.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  Part of buying a workstation with an online configurator is that you don't have to assemble it yourself.
  - tanelpoder 6y ago
    Yup, I totally get it. I had to tinker with power cables (the EVGA RTX 3090 required 3 x 8 pin power connectors). Also, cooling - I couldn’t get my hands on a blower-style RTX card, so the GPU just dumps its heat inside the chassis. I also bought cheap “eBay memory” instead of the more expensive Lenovo offering and had to reseat DIMMs a few times to stop having ECC errors (the memory scrubbing feature is nice).

jojobas 6y ago

As far as I understand, the only Lenovo-specific item in the build is the motherboard, still based on a generic chipset. Is there any benefit compared to building from individually purchased components?

wmf 6y ago
These components weren't supposed to be available separately, although that's changing.
- jojobas 6y ago
  Which components are these? Everything seems to be easy to come by.
  - notyourday 6y ago
    CPUs
    - jojobas 6y ago
      Right, should be on the shelf in a month or so. I wonder what kind of deal made these 5 months of Lenovo exclusivity worthwhile for AMD.
      - notyourday 6y ago
        I was actually shocked. I have friends in a biz high in the food chain so I typically can get a small number of what they get at cost + pay us for shipping. Sometime in October a bug bit me and I decided I was going to build myself a kick ass workstation to replace my aging 4790k and a server for VMs/containers. I did all the specs and build outs, including figuring out how I was going to change my "office" at home to accommodate additional gear. Imagine my surprise when my contacts said "Yeah, that's not happening. We can't get any."
      - junar 6y ago
        I wouldn't count on it, the motherboards are also currently catered towards system integrators. > The vendor, when asked about on-shelf availability, said that they don't particularly plan on doing a full retail packaging, but should AMD push the TR Pro CPUs into the consumer channel, they will prepare the appropriate boxing. In that light, as it stands, it looks like it will depend on AMD to decide if they want to enable the regular consumer retail channel. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16396/the-amd-wrx80-chipset-a-few-boards-for-3rd-gen-threadripper-pro https://www.anandtech.com/show/16396/the-amd-wrx80-chipset-a...

offtop5 6y ago

>*Current Februrary Offer for 42% Discount on Direct Sales This is the one thing I hate about Lenovo. Just show me the price , creating MEGA sales to try and entice me into buying isn't cool

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

walrus01 6y ago

Finally, something I can encode AV1 video on at 1:1 realtime. Too bad I can't afford it.