I am about to order a new workstation and this is the first time I'm picking specs myself. However, after searching for the past few days, I have come across very few actual user comments on current workstations from HP, Dell, Lenovo or Fujitsu (no other options) so I am hoping to get some comments here, especially regarding reliability. The workload does not benefit too much from a huge number of cores, so I am looking at single-socket workstations. I am however almost totally lost beyond that. Here's what I'm trying to figure out:
Thanks in advance for any comments.
- Are there major differences between manufacturers? I ran across a comment that Dell sometimes uses inferior capacitors (on Precision) and is inferior to HP and Lenovo. Anybody have experiences that mirror this? What about Dell going private, has that had any effect (positive or negative) on quality/reliability?
- Would there be noticeable difference in reliability between E3 workstations (HP Z230, Dell T1700, Lenovo E32/P300, Fujitsu W530) and single-socket E5 (HP Z420/Z440, Dell T3610/T5810, Lenovo P500, Fujitsu M730/M740)?
- Any other benefits/drawbacks you've observed?
- I can't realistically justify any E5 beyond the 1620 v2 or v3. Beyond the slightly increased L3 cache and memory bandwidth, does the E5 offer anything worthwhile over an E3-1275 v3 or is the single socket E5 a waste unless one goes for 6C or 8C CPUs? I get the feeling that entry or lower mid-level workstations are getting too competent for an ever larger group of users and I'm simply not the market for anything higher end because my workload cannot be massively parallelised. Is that on the mark?
Thanks in advance for any comments.