PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing.

Dell Updates Its Massive Workstation Desktop PCs

 & Joel Santo Domingo Former Lead Analyst, Hardware

Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

Our Expert
LOOK INSIDE PC LABS HOW WE TEST
65 EXPERTS
43 YEARS
41,500+ REVIEWS

Dell today introduced updates to its full-sized workstation desktop PCs, namely the Precision Tower 5810, Tower 7810, Tower 7910, and Rack 7910. All four massive workstations are designed for mission- and time-critical tasks in engineering, entertainment, manufacturing, and media.

The Dell Precision Towers and Rack mounted workstations are designed to give the individual worker the power to complete projects in a timely manner, with chassis designs that are serviced and managed by an in-house IT department. The Rack 7910 gives business users 1-to-1 workstation remote access, whether the worker is in the next room or half a world away in a work-sharing arrangement. The Rack 7910 will work remotely with the Wyse Zero Client, as well as software-based remote solutions.

Dell Precision Rack 7910The new workstations are powered by Intel's Haswell-EP based Xeon processors, including members of the Xeon E5-1600 v3 and Xeon E5-2600 v3 families. These processors will support DDR4-2133 memory, with a much speedier bandwidth than the DDR3-1600 memory common today. Other hot features include SAS-based PCIe SSD drives, internal support for up to RAID 5 arrays, options for new AMD and Nvidia graphics cards, and optimization for ISV-certified apps like 3DSmax, Adobe CC, and AutoCAD.

All of these new workstations will include a copy of Dell Performance Optimizer v2.0, which tailor Hyper-Threading, power, cooling, and clock speeds for the various ISV apps. Dell plans on optimizing the new workstations for 75 percent of certified ISV apps at launch, with 90-95 percent optimized by October 2014. The fact that the CPUs and GPUs are updating at the same time will help with these optimizations as well as a company's in-house testing and approval processes.

Look for the new Dell Precision Workstations on Dell.com, and follow PCMag.com for future workstation reviews and coverage.

About Our Expert

Joel Santo Domingo

Joel Santo Domingo

Former Lead Analyst, Hardware

Joel Santo Domingo joined PC Magazine in 2000, after 7 years of IT work for companies large and small. His background includes managing mobile, desktop and network infrastructure on both the Macintosh and Windows platforms. Joel is proof that you can escape the retail grind: he wore a yellow polo shirt early in his tech career. Along the way Joel earned a BA in English Literature and an MBA in Information Technology from Rutgers University. He is responsible for overseeing PC Labs testing, as well as formulating new test methodologies for the PC Hardware team. Along with his team, Joel won the ASBPE Northeast Region Gold award of Excellence for Technical Articles in 2005. Joel cut his tech teeth on the Atari 2600, TRS-80, and the Mac Plus. He’s built countless DIY systems, including a deconstructed “desktop” PC nailed to a wall and a DIY laptop. He’s played with most consumer electronics technologies, but the two he’d most like to own next are a Salamander broiler and a BMW E39 M5.

Read full bio