Pros & Cons
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- Reasonable starting price for a premium desktop workstation
- Highly scalable performance
- Generous connectivity mix
- Quiet cooling system
- Easy serviceability
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- No CPU liquid cooling or options for AMD CPUs
- Proprietary mainboard design
Dell Pro Max Tower T2 Specs
| Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 2 |
| Boot Drive Type | SSD |
| Desktop Class | Workstation |
| Graphics Card | Nvidia RTX 6000 Blackwell |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Pro |
| Processor | Intel Core Ultra 9 285K |
| Processor Speed | 3.7 |
| RAM (as Tested) | 128 |
| Secondary Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 2 |
| Secondary Drive Type | SSD |
Dell’s Pro Max Tower T2 (starts at $1,412; about $14,349 as tested) workstation starts modestly—and scales into a monster. Just look at our fully equipped review unit, which came packed with Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K processor, 128GB of ECC RAM, and Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000 packing a massive 96GB of VRAM. Dell complements the hardware with quiet cooling and excellent port selection. Add it all up, and you get an Editors' Choice workstation for professionals seeking a machine with a reasonable starter price—and the ability to upconfigure into an utter powerhouse.
Configurations: Modest Starter Model, Sky-High Potential
As we said, the base Pro Max Tower T2 starts off as a low-key machine, offering a Core Ultra 5 235 processor, integrated graphics, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD—basically, a budget desktop, as workstations go. Preconfigured models step up to 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, and Dell offers complete customization across the board. With four DIMM slots, the T2 supports up to 128GB using four 32GB DIMMs, and you can scale up the processor to a Core Ultra 9 285K, like in our review unit. (If you're upgrading from an earlier model, take note: Intel has discontinued its entry-level Xeon chips, formerly used for ECC support. The Core Ultra chips natively support ECC.)
GPU options range from dual entry-level or midrange cards, such as AMD’s Radeon Pro W7600 or Nvidia’s RTX Pro 2000 Ada, to a single high-end GPU, including the flagship RTX Pro 6000 “Blackwell” in our test system. You can't get AMD CPUs in this chassis, though Dell offers them in its higher-end towers.
You also get a lot of storage options, with two M.2 slots (one PCIe 5.0) and up to three hard drives, depending on the configuration. Be warned, though: Dell’s online configurator can be tricky, since you can only get certain components if you pair them with certain other hardware. For instance, if you're looking for K-series CPUs or top-tier GPUs, you need to upgrade to the 1,500-watt power supply and premium CPU cooling. Liquid cooling isn’t available, though that’s typical for this class.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Dell’s component choices parallel those of HP’s Z2 Tower G1i and Lenovo’s ThinkStation P2 Tower Gen 2. We won't compare the machines directly on cost, though, since businesses usually buy these systems through special deals with partners.
Design: A Clean, Purpose-Built Professional Chassis
The Pro Max Tower T2 lands squarely in mid-tower territory, at 15.2 by 7.4 by 17.2 inches (HWD). Its rolled-steel chassis and plastic front bezel aren’t flashy, but the build feels solid and well-suited for a professional setting.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Dell gives you plentiful connections. Front-panel ports include two USB Type-C (10Gbps and 20Gbps), two 5Gbps USB Type-A, a headset jack, and an optional SD-card reader. The power button and activity LED sit above the ports.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Rear connectivity covers four USB-A ports (two 10Gbps, two USB 2.0), two Thunderbolt 4, two USB-C (10Gbps and 20Gbps), and Serial. Some ports are optional, and Dell offers add-on video outputs or extra USB-A ports. Two DisplayPort connectors are integrated into the motherboard, though you would connect displays to the RTX Pro 6000’s four DisplayPort outputs. You can also get Wi-Fi 7.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The Interior Build: Upgradability and Drive Options
To get inside the chassis, you'll need to loosen a Phillips-head screw on the rear release handle, then pull the handle to free the side panel. Inside, much of the bare-steel frame is covered by a massive airflow guide spanning the front and rear fans to direct air across the large CPU cooler. The guide detaches tool-free by pulling on the blue touchpoints. The fans are quiet at idle, easily blending into background noise. While they get louder under load, the noise isn’t likely to create a bother.
The proprietary motherboard—nearly EATX in scale—takes up most of the interior. Its four DIMM slots are stacked to the right of the CPU cooler, while the two M.2 drive slots sit below the cooler and near the front of the primary PCIe slot. The RTX Pro 6000 is secured by a substantial support bracket. In this configuration, you can get one 3.5-inch bay along the bottom of the chassis, and also set up the front bay for either a drive or, as in our unit, a 9.5mm DVD writer. Up top, our system has Dell’s proprietary 1,500W power supply. Overall, the Dell delivers a clean and highly serviceable layout, with minimal exposed cabling and many tool-free options.
Almost no software comes preinstalled beyond Dell’s SupportAssist, which provides diagnostics, system updates, and support access. Dell backs the system with a three-year warranty.
Performance Testing: Evaluating the T2 at Full Tilt
We’re testing the Pro Max Tower T2 in a nearly maxed-out configuration, featuring an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor (24 total cores, 5.7GHz turbo), an Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Workstation Edition GPU, 128GB of DDR5 ECC memory running at 4,400MHz, and a 2TB PCIe 5.0 SSD running Windows 11 Pro, supplemented by a 2TB storage SSD.
For context, our benchmark charts include several heavyweight towers and compact powerhouses. The Falcon Northwest Talon arrives with a 96-core AMD Threadripper Pro and the same RTX Pro 6000 as the Dell; Lenovo’s dual-CPU ThinkStation PX represents multi-socket compute; and HP’s Z2 Mini G1a brings a surprisingly capable Ryzen AI Max+ mobile chip in a tiny chassis. We also added the Velocity Micro Z55a gaming desktop, which had completed our workstation test suite. The Falcon and Lenovo operate in a different class, given their massive CPU core and thread counts, but most of our workloads don’t fully exploit that scale.
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Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput.
Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image-editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.
These systems are all overqualified for the everyday office and web-browsing tasks that PCMark simulates. The Pro Max, in fact, finished just behind the Raptor Z55a with one of the highest scores we’ve recorded. It also aced the storage benchmark, again landing near the top of our historical results.
The CPU numbers were more nuanced. The Pro Max’s Core Ultra 9 285K couldn’t match the Cinebench multi-core scores of the Falcon and ThinkStation—no surprise, given their enormous core counts—but it delivered the strongest single-core score of the group. It also had the quickest Handbrake time, a test that doesn’t scale to massive core counts, and placed second only to the Falcon in Geekbench multi-core. Rounding things out, the Pro Max scored near the top of the charts in our Photoshop benchmark.
Gaming and Graphics Tests
We challenge each reviewed system’s graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. Steel Nomad's regular (4K) and Light (1440p) subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth test, Solar Bay, measures ray-tracing performance.
The Pro Max and the Falcon Northwest traded places in the 3DMark tests, with similar average performance from their RTX Pro 6000 GPUs. The Velocity Micro’s RTX 5090 fared better in a few tests, but the numbers are hard to compare, since its consumer-class drivers prioritize raw throughput and frame rates, whereas the RTX Pro stack is tuned for stability and rendering accuracy in professional workloads.
Workstation Tests
First, we measure workstation performance with SPECviewperf 2020 (version 3.1), which renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wireframe models at 1080p resolution. The three subtests represent PTC's Creo CAD platform, Autodesk's Maya modeling and simulation software for film, TV, and games, and Dassault Systemes' SolidWorks 3D rendering package.
Next up is Blender, an open-source 3D content-creation suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We record the time it takes for Blender 4.2 to render three distinct scenes to measure CPU and GPU rendering performance.
Finally, we use PugetBench for Creators to test DaVinci Resolve Studio 18 video-editor performance on systems suitable for that challenging app. These automated tasks and features push the CPU and GPU, letting us gauge real-world media-creation speeds.
The Pro Max landed just behind the powerful Talon across SPECviewperf. The Velocity Micro also kept pace except in Creo, where the specialized GPU drivers in the Pro Max and Talon delivered a clear advantage.
Blender’s CPU test scales to all available cores and threads, allowing the Falcon and ThinkStation to flex their muscle and pull well ahead of the Pro Max. In the GPU portion, however (not charted here), the Pro Max was even-keel with the Falcon, owing to their use of the same RTX Pro 6000 GPU.
The Pro Max truly whomped the crowd on the DaVinci Resolve benchmark, posting a dominant score that none of the other systems could match.