How ServeTheHome set out to review the NVIDIA Ada Gen GPU and Showcased APEXX S3 in the process.
ServeTheHome (STH) is one of my favorite tech sites, and not just because they occasionally review BOXX hardware. Editor-in-Chief Patrick Kennedy bills STH as the “IT professional's guide to servers, storage, networking, and high-end workstation hardware, plus great open source projects.”
If that sounds broad in scope, indeed it is, but each review is carefully crafted and complete with detailed information and abundant photography. STH readers can also rest assured that every product reviewed has been thoroughly tested by experienced tech professionals.
Recently, STH set out to review the new NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada generation GPU supplied by our friends at PNY. However, in order to adequately review the card, they needed a workstation platform. That’s where BOXX came in as we were among the first workstation manufacturers to offer the GPU in our APEXX workstations. We provided STH our best-selling APEXX S3, a powerhouse sub compact tower purpose-built for 3D CAD and motion media workflows (and capable of supporting two Ada gen GPUs).
As the March publication date neared, the review was delayed by a need to re-run several benchmarks. So in its place, STH’s Peter Liu wrote a terrific overview of the S3, featuring some outstanding photography. Near the beginning of his piece, Liu wrote, “We thought, why not show folks the new GPU in a cool system? This is not going to be a full review, but we just wanted to show off something fun that came into the lab.”
What follows, is a solid discussion of the BOXX chassis (designed by our engineers using SOLIDWORKS) and manufactured in Central Texas. Liu also mentions the back panel configuration and the intricacies and importance of our air and liquid cooling systems. When discussing high performance workstations, system cooling often gets lost in the shuffle among CPU core count, processor speed, GPUs, and the like. It’s odd, because those components cannot run your compute intensive applications efficiently unless said components are kept cool. If you’re familiar with thermal throttling, you know it’s when the CPU slows down to avoid overheating due to warming under a heavy workload. Air cool only workstations can be impacted by this problem, so that’s why BOXX also relies on liquid cooling.
The STH APEXX S3 overview also covers the Intel Core i9 processor (performance-tuned to 6.0 GHz), and of course, the NVIDIA GPU. As I mentioned at the outset, it’s not an in-depth review with benchmarks, but it’s still a good look at the workstation we call our flagship. Give it a read, along with the highly detailed NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada gen review which ran a few weeks later. Both are well worth your time.
Photo courtesy of STH