New design, new brand, same value.

By Alex Herrera

Lenovo has become an outstanding supplier of workstations, with a recent, sharpened focus on the market that makes it a serious contender for mar­ket leadership. HP and Dell dominate the space today, but despite its relatively distant third place, Lenovo has delivered an impressive growth story. The big two are now keeping an eye on the rear­view mirror for the Chinese computer giant, which has recently launched a re­designed lineup, with the Thinkstation P300 as its economy-focused product offering.

Lenovo backed into the workstation market, but it’s no bystander today

Lenovo entered the workstation mar­ket as a by-product of its acquisition of IBM’s PC business. Inheriting the Think­Pad P line in 2005, Lenovo found itself the industry leader in mobile worksta­tions. However, it wasn’t clear the com­pany considered workstations a strate­gic business until 2007, when it made a more deliberate move into the segment with a line of single- and dual-socket deskside workstations.

That initial workstation family— the S series (entry-level, single-socket), D series (premium-class, dual-socket), and C series (compact dual-socket)—has helped the company steadily gain market share, albeit modestly. In 2Q14, Lenovo shipped about 13.7% of the work­station units world­wide. Although more heavily slanted toward mobiles (it has about 19.1% of the worldwide mobile workstation mar­ket), its desksides are making substantial contributions to the company’s product sales.

Not counting the usual component refresh cycles, for the past few years the Thinkstation S, C, and D series re­mained largely unchanged since their introductions. However, with Lenovo appearing to be seriously and strategi­cally positioning the company in the workstation market, we expected a sub­stantial redesign (and likely some re­branding). HP made a large investment in a new, comprehensively engineered Z family of workstations in 2009. Realizing it needed to match its rival’s com­mitment in order to succeed in the mar­ket, Dell refocused its efforts as well with the overhauled Precision line in 2012. In 2014, it was Lenovo’s turn.

In August 2014, the company launched a new line, replacing the S, C, and D prefixes with a unified “P” pre­fix brand. Aligning with the industry’s de facto standard four-tier product line, Lenovo rebuilt its Thinkstation brand in two steps. First to ship was the P300, the company’s entry-level single-socket ma­chine. The other three came later, based on Haswell-E (shipped in October). The P500 is the premium single-socket model; the P700 is the compact, econo­my dual-socket model; and the P900 is the top-end dual-socket machine.

As its rivals did in their respective workstation line renaissances, Lenovo re-engineered the chassis, improving the ergonomics and cooling (and therefore noise and reliability as well). The com­pany added the now industry-ubiqui­tous integrated handles, as well as color-coded “touchpoint” access points for tool-less access, addition, and removal of components, including the power supply unit (PSU).

Lenovo’s engineers reworked the workstations’ airflow via “Tri Chan­nel” cooling, which the company claims both simplifies and enhances airflow efficiency. The Tri Channel Cooling ap­proach allowed for fewer fans, in turn improving reliability (fewer to fail) and acoustics (fewer to contribute to noise).

Perhaps Lenovo’s most notable dif­ferentiator came in the area of slot and bay flexibility. With the new P series, the company unveiled its Flex technology, which consists of a few components de­signed to make available space and I/O accommodate as many different combi­nations of devices as possible per user requirements. A Flex Bay, for example, can accommodate not only the typi­cal optical drive, but also an ultra-slim drive, a media card reader, or Firewire. A Flex Tray can populate both 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives, one of the latter or two of the former. Capable of housing seven Flex trays, the P900 can support 14 drives.

A third component, the Flex Connec­tor, is an optional “mezzanine” daugh­ter card that can sit directly on the motherboard to provide SATA, SAS, or PCIe storage without occupying PCIe slots.

Some workstations are built for all-out performance and all-out expan­sion, while others are built to deliver the workstation basics—reliability with an application-optimized performance boost—at the minimum cost. Lenovo’s take on the latter model is the Thinkstation P300, a machine that starts at $729. Our review model was of a conventional mini-tower, but the P300 comes in a small form factor version as well.

Despite its attention to economy, the P300 can certainly be configured to crank professional-grade performance. It supports a range of Core i7 and Core E3 Haswell-class CPUs, up to 32 GB of memory, and up to four bays of storage that max capacity at 16 TB. Graphics capabilities come courtesy of an Nvidia Quadro add-in card, with Has­well’s integrated GPU as a mini­mal-cost option.

With its signature honeycomb grill, the P300 exterior shares the same look-and-feel as the rest of the new P-series family. Pay­ing attention to costs, the P300 has a no-frills interior, but that doesn’t mean it feels cheap. On the contrary, the interior is neat and accessible, and we liked the trade-offs Lenovo made in deliver­ing tool-less access without being flimsy.

Tool-less is now a check-mark item for workstations, and the P300 complies, with blue-coded tabs to guide fingers looking to open panels, release cards, and swap bays. In particular, we valued the squeeze-to-release end tab on the PCI Express slot, which was both simple and solid.

We also preferred Lenovo’s GPU card retention system over most. Rather than relying on plastic, slide-in reten­tion for the end of the card, Lenovo has a fixed metal bracket that attaches se­curely to the card via two thumb screws. We move around our machines a lot, and GPU cards—particularly the heavy, high-end, dual-slot variety—are the eas­iest components to displace.

As with its predecessor, the Thinkstation E32, the P300 comes with an 85% efficient power supply, rated for 280 watts. There is a more efficient (92%) and more powerful 450-watt supply option.

The P300’s I/O options is unlikely to disappoint, providing four USB 3.0, two USB 2.0 in the rear, one eSATA, one Ethernet, and the standard analog audio ports. The only omission worth noting is Thunderbolt, but its appeal is still limited in most workstation appli­cations (as opposed to the Mac space, where it is essential). The rear panel also includes a legacy VGA and two modern DisplayPort video interfaces to support the Haswell CPU’s on-board GPU.

Benchmarking the P300

While the P300 can be configured with components to push its actual price well in excess of its advertised starting-at price, ours came outfitted with upgrades that pushed it to a selling price of $2,068, a figure that sits pretty much squarely at the market’s current ASP. First and foremost among up­ a Kepler generation card paired with 3 GB. Selling at retail at around $900, the K4000 is responsible for a healthy chunk of the P300’s price tag.

An ideal comparison machine for us is the P300’s predecessor, the Thinkstation E32, a machine we reviewed earlier in 2014 in a small form factor version.

With the exception of the GPU, the two machines are configured very simi­larly, with the only other notable dif­ference being the P300’s slightly faster CPU. The pair make good test cases to assess how much difference the more capable GPU can make, given the price adder.

We tested both machines with SPEC. org’s SPECwpc benchmark suite. SPEC­wpc’s whole-system testing gives a clear­er idea of how the fully configured sys­tem will perform, considering the entire workload, including application, graph­ics, memory, OS, I/O, etc. It’s designed to be comprehensive, comprising sepa­rate suites, one per each of six verticals, including Media and Entertainment, Product Development, Energy, Life Sci­ences, Financial Services, and General Operations. Each suite includes any­where from five to nine workloads, relevant to those specific spaces. The new benchmark reports a composite score, aggregating sub-test results, for each of the six application suites.

Not surprisingly, the Quadro K4000–equipped P300 tops the E32 with a more modest K600 GPU on five of the six composite scores, but the de­gree of superiority varies by workload. We couldn’t compare composites on the Media and Entertainment suite be­cause the E32’s initial testing failed on one component (Handbrake). The two workstations performed similarly on the rest of the Media and Entertainment components, with the notable and ex­pected exception of Maya, which is es­pecially GPU sensitive.

With specs at least on par with the E32’s, and with a vastly superior GPU, the P300 shouldn’t lose out on raw scores. And it doesn’t. But what’s often more interesting, particularly in the economy-focused end of the mar­ket, is how the performance scales with incremental dollars. How well does the P300’s higher build cost—the bulk of which is attributable to the K4000 GPU —provide a return in the form of high­er performance? The composite and Media and Entertainment scores give an indication.

As we’d expect, price/performance favors the lower-cost machine, a typical and sensible result that reflects dimin­ishing returns as the price climbs. The exception, once again, is in running the Maya workload, which heavily depends on GPU throughput and benefits from the far superior K4000.

In the JPR Workstation Report, we in­clude the rest of the suites’ sub-test results, both raw scores and scores/$. Though the degree varies by application space and sub-test, the results track the overall composites, with the Boxx lead­ing in absolute score and the Lenovo E32 leading in scores per dollar.

What do we think?

Whether it originally entered the market by intent or not, the company has learned what it takes to compete. As evidence, we’re seeing Lenovo up its in­terest and investment in comprehensive engineering and marketing, to keep up with primary competitors, Dell and HP. It knew it needed to match the market leaders’ level of commitment, and with the recent launch of the new Thinkstation P series, it has.

The new P series integrates the same core components from Intel and Nvid­ia that its rivals rely on. And it’s made many of the same enhancements to the chassis design, like optimal cooling, ergonomics, and minimal noise. Plus, it’s taken its own slant in a few areas, like tool-less access. In terms of well-thought-out, well-engineered design, the P series holds its own.

In the benchmarking of the Think­station P300—and particularly in con­trast with the previous testing of its predecessor, the Thinkstation E32—we reached these conclusions:

• With a similar configuration, the P300 can compete head-on with its rivals’ comparable offerings, most notably HP’s Z230 and Dell’s Preci­sion T1700.
• A machine that is “entry” in name, like Lenovo’s Thinkstation P300, can be capably equipped, yielding excep­tional performance if so desired.
• Where those capabilities climb, how­ever, the price climbs with it, and performance usually scales with di­minishing returns.
• For professional workloads stressing the visualization of big, complex 3D models, the GPU is one of the best places to spend extra dollars.

Lenovo is a workstation newbie no longer. Like HP and Dell, Lenovo is now “all-in” on workstations, and this lat­est, comprehensive refresh of its Thinkstation line shows it. Its market share is climbing, and both the company and its products should continue to grow as a force in the market.