The Dell Precision T3610 is a professional workstation tower that out performs all current competitors. It's got an Intel Xeon (based on the Ivy Bridge-EP architecture) processor, Nvidia Quadro K4000 graphics, and a chassis capable of holding a lot more than came with our review unit. It's the one to buy if your time-constrained power users like engineers, scientists, research doctors, and art directors need a monster system for their billable work. It's our latest Editors' Choice for single-processor workstation desktops.

Design and Features
The Precision T3610 we reviewed is in a full-sized tower, with some new-school flourishes. It has a perforated front and back panel for good airflow through the chassis and over heat-producing components. The front face is a vertical bi-level, with an aluminum handle to help in moving the system around. There's another handle in the back for pulling the system under a desk from the other side. That's the main design philosophy of the Precision T3610 chassis: It's designed for the IT pro that needs to service it. All the levers and touch points that move are marked with the same cornflower blue color, and they're all tool-less, so you can pop PCIe cards or hard drives in and out of the chassis in seconds, not minutes. There's a lot more room inside the Precision T3610 than in smaller chassis like the one housing our single-processor workstation Editors' Choice HP Z230 SFF Workstation ($2,045) and entry-level workstation EC Dell Precision T1700 SFF ($994).

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The extra room gives myriad expansion possibilities, since you can add four more memory DIMMs, a 5 1/4-inch optical drive, another 3.5-inch hard drive, PCI card, and five more PCIe cards (one PCIe2 x1, one PCIe2 x4, one PCIe3 x8, and one PCIe3 x16). The PCIe x4 and x8 card slots are physically PCIe x16 long, but are wired for the lower bandwidth listed. A nice touch is that the card slots are marked both on the legend stuck to the chassis door and on the motherboard itself, so you can make sure you're plugging a PCIe3 x8 (25W) card in the correct slot. The drive bays listed above are pre-wired, so you won't have to waste time finding and stringing power cables through the chassis. The memory slots are under ducts that protect the memory for the heat from the CPU and GPU, but they are easy to pop off after you remove the optical drive bay (a two second process).

The back and front I/O ports are excellent, with three USB 2.0 ports and one USB 3.0 port on the front panel. The back has three more USB 2.0 ports, three USB 3.0 ports, serial, audio, Ethernet, PS/2 mouse and keyboard (to accommodate a favorite old keyboard/mouse), DVI and two DisplayPorts. It's worth noting that the USB ports are all colored black, so you'll have to look for the USB-SS logos to locate the USB 3.0 ports.

You can of course configure the Precision T3610 to the particular needs of your engineers, scientists, graphics artists, or other power users. Our review unit included an Intel Xeon E5-1620 v2 processor, 16GB of DDR3 ECC RAM, a 3GB Nvidia Quadro K4000 graphics card, a tray-loading DVD burner, and a 1TB 7,200rpm SATA hard drive. We'd suggest adding a SSD drive as the boot drive for speed, but you can configure the system with speedier 10k SATA, 15k SAS, or even PCIe SSD.

The hard drive came with Windows 7 Professional pre-installed, along with a recovery option for Windows 8 Pro. This is a plus for companies that haven't yet made the move to Windows 8. The Precision T3610 is ISV certified for a variety of applications, including Dassault Systèmes CATIA, Autodesk Revit, Autodesk Inventor 3D CAD, PTC Creo, Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0, and Siemens PLM – NX. The Precision T3610 has a standard three-year warranty, which can be extended or upgraded depending on your contract with Dell.

Performance
Performance is why you'd buy a workstation system over a run-of-the-mill business desktop, and the Precision T3610 has performance in spades. The Precision T3610 beats all of the workstations we've seen before on the 3D benchmark tests, thanks to its Nvidia Quadro K4000 graphics card. The K4000 is the most powerful single-slot workstation card from NVidia, the K5000 and higher need two card slots of space.