Lenovo ThinkStation S30

As is the case with any other computer, the desktop workstation for you is the one that comes closest to meeting your specific needs. If you're shopping for a do-everything business system, there's a compelling case to be made for the Lenovo ThinkStation S30: It blends high-level processing with graphics performance, giving you enough general strength to do almost anything you want. But digging down a bit deeper reveals this as a computer more aptly suited to video-oriented tasks than for traditional data-crunching uses, which may or may not be right for you. If you think your business will benefit from the balance it provides, the ThinkStation may be worth its fairly steep price. If not, other, less-expensive systems may better suit your needs.

Design and Features
Under normal circumstances you shouldn?t expect a workstation to excel in the looks department, and that's a standard the ThinkStation S30 lives up to. Basic black from stem to stern, with little to distinguish it except a bit of hexagonal mesh ornamentation on the front, it looks austere and serious, as though it?s interested in nothing more than getting right to work. In accordance with this, it?s largely bereft of exciting features, the most notable exception being the sturdy handle affixed to the front of the top panel. This makes the system easy to carry, deploy, and pull out from the cubbies beneath desks where it?s most likely to be stored. A latch on the side panel opens the PC instantly, without requiring you to even remove thumbscrews.

Just as its outward appearance is of the buttoned-down, do-the job mentality, so is the S30?s hardware both inside and out. At the heart of it all is a fine Intel Xeon E5-1620 CPU; the quad-core chip can run eight threads a time thanks to Intel?s Hyper-Threading technology, and runs at a highly respectable clock speed of 3.6GHz. Joining it is a solid 8GB of RAM, which is upgradable to as much as 128GB (only two of the eight DIMM slots are full), and a 2GB Nvidia Quadro 4000 workstation video card that sports one DVI and two full-size DisplayPort outputs. (The card is held in place inside the computer by two large, potentially difficult-to-remove plastic brackets.) Should you want to install additional cards, there's another PCI Express (PCIe) x16 slot, one PCIe x4 slot, one PCIe x1 slot, and one traditional PCI slot still available for this.

Two 7,200rpm 500GB hard drives in a RAID Level 0 configuration provide the storage, and can be expanded by way of two internal SATA ports; the optical drive is a standard, but undeniably useful, DVD?RW. An external multiformat card reader supports the CF, XD, SD, and MS formats. Should you wish to expand further, there are two open bays: one external 5.25-inch and one internal 3.5-inch. The included 610-watt power supply is more than sufficient for these components, and should give you a bit of freedom for later expansion.

Externally, ten USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0 ports provide you plenty of connectivity opportunities; but there are only two USB 2.0 ports on the front panel, along with the headphone and microphone jacks, and hooking up the included keyboard and mouse will remove two of the others from play right off the bat. The preinstalled operating system is the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional, and comes bearing a bit of bloatware: Rescue and Recovery, Adobe Reader, Microsoft Office 2010 Starter, WinDVD, Ulead DVD Movie Factory, and a 30-day trial of Norton Internet Security. (The chances are good that your organization will have your own solutions, so you?ll probably have at least a little bit of uninstallation to do.)

At least you receive some fairly robust protection with the S30: It?s covered by a three-year parts-and-labor warranty, and you have access to around-the-clock toll-free technical support.

Performance
The ThinkStation S30 delivered excellent performance?enough to earn the top score we've seen in this class (3,494) in our Futuremark PCMark 7 full-system benchmark. It faltered, however, in Handbrake, CineBench R11.5, and Adobe Photoshop CS5, in each surpassed only by the Dell Precision T1600 . The Dell?s lead in each case was not overwhelming?1 minute 13 seconds in Handbrake (versus 1:14 for the S30), 6.87 in CineBench (versus 6.38), and 2:57 in Photoshop (versus 3:01)?but enough to show that raw processing is not necessarily the ThinkStation's greatest strength.

Lenovo does come out securely on the top in one area. Although we know that no one would ever deign to use a workstation as beefy as the S30 for gaming, its upper-end video card gives it enough oomph to occupy the top of the results chart for Futuremark 3DMark 11 and for our gaming tests at lower resolutions and detail settings. These numbers could be improved by swapping out the Quadro for a dedicated gaming card, but at the business tasks for which S30 was intended the original card is definitely the preferable way to go.

That Quadro 4000, by the way, is the best argument in favor of the Lenovo ThinkStation S30: It gives this system powerful capabilities that could serve you well in all manner of drafting and rendering scenarios. But because those are specialized needs that won't apply to everyone, we're sticking with the Dell Precision T1600 as our Editors' Choice: It's a slightly stronger performer in terms of everyday processing, and costs nearly $500 less, making it more attractive for a broader range of professional uses. If, on the other hand, you need that extra graphics oomph, the ThinkStation S30 is an excellent choice.

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