Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 13, 2006. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
US provider Boxx Technologies is launching a high-performance workstation that, due to its performance, is intended to be particularly suitable for the VFX developers among DCC users. The model, called Apexx 4, is designed as a 64-bit workstation, is based on four AMD Opteron processors with dual-core technology and supports up to 64 GBytes of RAM.
The new Boxx workstation is intended to achieve the computing performance of proprietary Unix workstations, but at a fraction of their cost, the company advertises. “The Apexx 4 workstation achieves an acceleration factor of 7.2 in our standard rendering benchmark compared with a single-processor system,” Boxx quotes Runa Loeber, Director Platforms & Security at Mental Images: “Instead of waiting seven minutes for a complex scene to render, it now takes less than one minute.”
To make the performance usable in practice, Boxx says it has ensured compatibility for a range of applications with software providers. To meet the requirements of VFX developers, the workstation was also quiet enough to stand directly next to the artist, Boxx argues.
The price of the standard configuration running Red Hat Linux with 8 GBytes of RAM, two 80-GByte and two 400-GByte SATA hard disks, the Nvidia FX 4500 graphics card, 16x DVD burner and two 19-inch displays is 29,575 US dollars. The Advanced configuration, which includes 32 GBytes of RAM and a RAID 5 system with a capacity of 2.8 TBytes, costs 55,312 US dollars. Detailed information are available on the Boxx website.
Further Links:
- Boxx Technologies: Apexx 4 Workstation
