Boston Venom 3401-7T Workstation Review

Introduction

Although Boston may at first not be familiar to many, rest assured with a presence in America, UK, Germany and India this is a truly global company.  They supply one of the widest variety of business hardware available, from micro servers, blade servers, Quadro workstation and even green and cloud solutions. Today we will be looking at the Boston Venom 3401-7T, which is one of their flagship models of their Venom series, which has been designed for high-performance graphics, parallel processing and high-speed rendering. With this being one of our first enterprise workstation reviews we have a fresh selection of benchmarks which will help us push these high specification systems to their limits. We have a wide range including CPU, GPU, Memory and storage benchmarks which will help us collect some statistics which will help us find the cream of the crop of workstation rigs and at the same time provide our audience with informative concise results.

Although normally in reviews we don’t usually use descriptions that suppliers supply us with, with workstations often being targeted at a particular use or task and I feel that it makes sense for us to include a small description from Boston on what area the Venom is aimed at.

“The Boston Venom 3401-7T is designed to be the ultimate workstation for all design, VFX and digital content professionals.  The Venom 3401-7T is a workstation designed by Boston that brings together the often disjointed design and simulation processes into one package; dramatically increasing productivity and allowing engineers, designers and content creators to do more, faster, and with better results.”

So on that note, we have some high expectations going into this review!

Specifications

• Name: Boston Venom 3401-7T
• Case: Silverstone Fortress Series Case FT04 – Black
• Motherboard: Supermicro X10DAX
• Processor: Intel Xeon Processor E5-2687WV3 3.1GHz (Haswell) x 2 with 4% Overclock
• Processor Cooler: Custom Dual Liquid Cooled Solution
• System Memory: 8GB DDR4-2133 1Rx4 ECC REG DIMM (8x8GB Sticks)
• Main Boot Drive: Samsung 850 PRO 512GB SATAIII x 2 in RAID 0
• Additional Storage Drive(s): Western Digital SE 2TB SATA III – 6Gb/s Hard Drive 24×7 Enterprise Class x2 in RAID 1
• Graphics card: NVIDIA Quadro K5200 Retail 8GB, 2304 CUDA Cores, PCE-E (x16) 256-bit, GDDR5 256-bit
• Power Supply: Supermicro PS2 1200W Multi Output High Efficiency Power Supply
• Optical Drive: 15X Internal Blu Ray Writer with SATA-OEM
• Wireless: Not included
• Monitor: Not included
• Peripherals: Not included
• OS: Windows 7 64 Bit
• Warranty: 3 Year return to base warranty with 1 year parts swapout (UK only)
• Price: £9,118.87 inc VAT as configured Delivered.

We knew we were in for a treat when it came on its own pallet…

This system is extremely heavy, it was a 2 man job just to get it out the box!

The Silverstone Fortress FT04 (as reviewed here).  Don’t let it’s modest looks fool you, there is some of the fastest hardware money can buy tucked away in here!

CPU-Z

GPU-Z