Review: Dell Precision T5500

I received my Dell Precision T5500 on 4 Sept 2009. It’s only been after so many days that I’ve found time away from it to actually sit and write about it. This review is a tale of my experiences with what Dell is today and all that I had to face to get this system to get it actually working. Let’s start with the configuration.

Configuration

• Processor: Dual Xeon E5520
• Memory: 6GB DDR3 tri-channel 1066MHz ECC SDRAM
• Harddrive: Dual 250GB in Raid 0 (Possibly western digital)
• AX510 Sound Bar
• Dual 2408WFP UltraSharp(TM)24″ Widescreen Flat Panel LCD Monitor(Analog&DVI)
• Dual 512MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX580, Quad Monitor DisplayPort,DVI
• Additionally to support this beast I purchased a  APC Smart-UPS 1500VA UPS

The Dell Precision T5500 falls under the workstation category which indicates that more thought has gone into the system design and component selection for maximum stability and class performance. Unlike the consumer or business machines, the workstations are targeted to the user seeking excellent performance, system durability and stability. Coupled with dual 24″ Dell 2408wfp monitors this is the dream machine I always wanted to buy. The choice of components was quite challenging as Dell doesn’t allow you to configure this system online and I had to call a sales agent to configure it over the phone. As a result I made several calls spanning over a week. I was attended by different agents everytime and none was able to configure it. Sometimes there was a parts mismatch. At other times someone promised to send me a quotation but never actually did. Finally I did receive a quotation. I had to negotiate and review every little alteration and configuration comparing the price difference and specs. online while I spoke over the phone. A terrible thing Dell does to its customer purchasing high-end machines. The sales agent are not tech savvy either and have to reach out to another sales agent to get the queries answered. And despite all my effort I was shipped a machine in a desktop orientation. Anyways, here’s my take on the choice of components:

• Processor: When buying a high-end system like this you essentially have to have a big budget. Yet you are on a budget. The Xeon E5520 is a processor from the Xeon 5500 series. It doesn’t tout high frequency operation but lies somewhere at the bottom of the higher end. It’s the cheapest of the quad cores in the series, supports hyperthreading amongst a host of other features. Essentially this is the implementation of the Core i7 technology for Xeon. No extreme editions but multi-coring (a word that I coined myself). This ends up showing 16 logical CPUs to the taskmanager.
• Memory: The Xeon E5520 operate on 1066MHz which goes with the memory I chose – no bottlenecks. At the time, I thought 6GB would be more than required.
• Harddrive: I started with dual one-terabyte drives in RAID 0. But you can’t rely on a RAID 0 for data reliability as it doesn’t have any redundancy. All the data is split and stored spanning over two drives. Read and write speeds are extremely fast on a RAID 0. I had to cut it down to 250GB each so that I can cut the price and only use the drives for the operating system and some other frequently used data. Rest will be stored on DVDs or a better storage device in the future.
• Video: I’m not a gamer. Not quite true because I’ve burnt my eyes red playing Mario. But today’s games scare me. I’m a web developer and like accurate performance. I went with the dual Nvidia Quadro FX580.
• Monitor: I’ve read a lot of good reviews about the Dell 2408WFP wide-color-gamut monitors. 24″ is the size that I was looking for. But honestly I’ve never liked a machine since I quit my full-time job. I used a 17″ dual-monitor setup there. You never want to come back to a single monitor once you’ve use a dual-monitor setup. The dual 2408WFP is a costly but excellent choice.
• Sound: With my 10000W PMPO music system hooked up to this machine I didn’t care for sound. But the Dell AX510 soundbar came as a pleasant surprise.
• UPS: The max power requirement for this model is approx 980 watts. Add two monitors and printer or so. Add a buffer of 15% which roughly equates to 1500 watts. But 1500VA is not equivalent to 1500watts because there’s something called power factor. Luckily the T5500 I configured didn’t have such humungous power requirements – no extreme end CPU or video cards.

Rest of the hardware was the usual stuff, the network adapter the 16x DVD burner etc.

Dell Precision T5500 out of the box

The dual monitor configuration was not available so the extra monitor had to be purchased separately and was delivered a week earlier than the system. The system was delivered in multiple boxes and I was so disheartned to find out that at the end of the day I did miss a minor detail configuring the system – they shipped me the desktop orientation and not the mini-tower orientation. With the buildings growing vertically due to lack of space and the Precision T5500 being pushed as “dual core performance in a small footprint” I was at a loss of words to see this thing demanding horizontal space on the small desk in my small office. But that wasn’t the last thing to hurt me. The front bezel of this system read T3500 – the cheaper system with only a single processor. I knew I was having a bad day.

I took my time arranging the system parts and through the cables. I turned it on and it didn’t start. It was a loose power cable. It then started but didn’t boot to an operating system even though I purchased it with DOS. I took my time installing the OS and all. And finally the system came to life.

Performance

Good news and bad news. The DVD burner only burnt at 4x and needed a replacement. The front bezel teased me with the T3500 label. I had it replaced only to find that the new bezel missed the Intel Xeon inside label. I’m not a benchmark freak but I did test the system to my satisfaction. This system was willing to take anything that you’d throw at it. And then it would laugh back at you. I compiled a Firefox PGO build which only lasted about over an hour and a few minutes. Generally it took me 4-5 hours to do the same on my dual core 2.0GHz 4GB machine. All through this the CPU didn’t go above 20%. However the memory did get saturated while linking thanks to the memory hog that Windows is. I’m even willing to upgrade to 12GB but I doubt if that will suffice. If you need any specific benchmarks just ask or comment. The Windows Experience Index on this machine was 5.9 on Vista for all components. It stayed at 5.9 on Windows 7 pulled down by the harddrive performance while it stayed at 7.7 for the CPU and memory, 6.4 for all graphics and 5.9 for the harddrive. The performance is perfectly acceptable for casual gaming and I can always try a take or two till I surrender to those horrendous ghastly looking monsters.

The wide gamut monitors are less than a treat out of the box. But with proper tuning the colors come to life. Perfect for photography and multimedia the Dell 2408WFP is a great monitor with great connectivity. My Philips 29″ TV 29PT9421 ditched me a month back. I hate to get the faithless thing repaired and the Dell 2408wfp is a good working substitute.

Overall

The time I spend doing my research prior to buying and otherwise tell me that todays operating systems are still trying to come up to challenges like utilizing the power or multi-cores, multi-threading etc. Snow Leopard promises moves in such direction and Microsoft has been silent on Windows 7 playing it down. It’s a cat and a mouse game where the hardware and the software are always trying to catch up with each other. For now the multi-core wins. I’m sure this system will last me about 3 years beyond which it will still be usable as a fast desktop but will run short of warranty or perhaps go end-of-life for the manufacturer. It’s a good investment so long as I can make use of it.

P.S. – No photographs for this system as it’s fixed into a lot of cables in a tight slot under my desk. However on the inside too it’s tightly shoved with all the components with an additional CPU raiser for the extra processor. If you want you can request photographs through comments.