WSX114 workstation: Review

WSX114 workstation
Workstation Specialists’ latest CS4-enhanced system is billed as the ultimate in digital productivity, but does it deliver?

With 23 years of experience in the field of custom-built graphic workstations for the CAD, visual effects and animation markets, Workstation Specialists clearly has a very good idea of what’s important when it comes to building a suitable system for your work. Since the WSX114 is part of its flagship ‘ultimate’ range, you can also be sure that it incorporates leading-edge technical wizardry to ensure your workflow and image fidelity isn’t hamstrung by hardware.

Built on a backbone of Intel’s blazingly fast Core i7 950 processor technology, the system has been overclocked to run at an incredible 4GHz – just about squeezing every last drop of speed possible from the chip maker’s top-drawer CPU. To put that into context, the fastest we’ve seen a system run using similar processors is 4.2GHz – an astonishing speed. However, overclocking is something of a double-edged sword in that it can lead to instability, so Workstation Specialists has wisely taken a small step back from the absolute limit to ensure solid, reliable performance. Since reliability is of utmost important when it comes to workstations, we tested its mettle in this regard using a well-known form of processor torture testing – Prime95. The software itself is used to calculate Mersenne prime numbers that are literally millions of digits long, but since it puts the processor and memory under considerably more strain than even the most demanding multithreaded application like Photoshop ever could, it’s the perfect candidate to ensure that a system is 100 per cent stable. Suffice to say, it passed with flying colours, making it an ideal tool for earning the £100,000 prize for finding the first prime number with 100 million digits. With much more than just a fast processor and 12GB of solid DDR3 RAM under the hood, however, this would be a heinous waste of a perfectly good Photoshop workstation.

In terms of speed, its four native cores (doubled to eight if you take Hyper Threading into account) provide enough power to ensure there’s literally nothing else on the open market that can beat it. Since Photoshop CS4 is so well optimised for running tasks across multiple cores, it made short work of our basic filtering benchmarks. From our tests, it was immediately obvious that we could run batch processes in the background while concentrating on another facet of our workflow without a noticeable drop in performance. Despite this, the WSX114 is surprisingly quiet under a heavy load, a considerable feat considering the aforementioned overclocking and is an important (if somewhat overlooked) aspect of a usable workstation.
Despite an already impressive show of technical prowess, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what makes the WSX114 such an intriguing prospect. Some of you may be aware that CS4 features the ability to use the latent power in many of today’s graphics cards to increase image fidelity and processing performance of a system. This is thanks to NVIDIA’s CUDA (compute unified device architecture), a parallel computing architecture designed to move compatible processor-intensive tasks away from the humble CPU onto the surprisingly versatile and capable graphics processor.

In recent times, graphics processing units (GPUs) have leapfrogged CPUs as the architecturally dominant force in computing. With many million more transistors dedicated to computational tasks, NVIDIA’s CUDA can provide an incredible speed boost with a compatible graphics card and software. The Quadro FX 1800 with 768MB of its own dedicated memory featured in the WSX114 is a prime example of a card with this cutting-edge technology, although it also works with off-the-shelf cards designed for home computers and PC gaming starting at just £50. While CS4 boasts many CUDA-compatible facets off the shelf, the technology is still young and very few plug-ins are currently compatible. Thankfully, for a relatively standard workflow the biggest boosts are immediately evident. The manipulation and filtering of very large images is probably the most obvious example. Halving the time it takes to blur a 500MB file – especially considering the awesome speed of today’s test system – is a feat of extraordinary proportions.

Zooming in and around particularly large canvasses can be a drag with a basic PC, but with CUDA enabled it is possible to mill around the most demanding image without a hint of stutter or lag. With CUDA you also have image fidelity enhancements, entirely ridding your screen of jagged edges thanks to image smoothing, completely removing the need for interpolation at nonstandard zoom settings.
We’re sure we’ve barely seen the start of CUDA’s capabilities, and despite the current lack of suite-wide compatibility, the incredible speed and silky smooth operation of the WSX114 offers us a level of future proofing we’re confident matches the large asking price. While predominantly aimed at users of the latest version of Adobe’s world beating app, the WSX114’s cutting edge processor, ample RAM and super-fast SSD hard drive ensure it’s the most capable system around, CS4 or otherwise.