Archive notice: This article was originally published on September 1, 2018. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
What initially sounds like a step backwards – with 16 bits and a maximum clock frequency of 10 MHz, the 8086 is naturally somewhat slower than a current i7 8700K, for example – quickly proves to be an advantage in practice. As the 8086 from 1978 has neither interrupt nor direct memory access, there are logically no problems with latency. The lack of a floating point unit is also easy to get over due to the good floating point.
Joking aside, an Intel 8086 CPU is actually installed in the DAX workstation, albeit with the prefix i7. It is therefore a limited CPU from the 14 nm coffeelake production with 6 cores and 4 GHz clock frequency / 5 GHz boost, which was produced in limited numbers of 8086s to mark the 40th anniversary of the 8086 and the 50th anniversary of Intel.
Housing
The lockable 19″ rack case has been used by DAX for several years now and is probably more stable and reliable than most armoured tanks of the German Armed Forces. As the mainboard is installed horizontally in this case, it is possible for DAX to install a ridiculously large CPU heatsink with a large, slowly rotating fan. When mounting a CPU heatsink vertically in a tower case, a limit is quickly reached due to the tensile forces occurring at the CPU socket.
Apart from the Nvidia GTX 1070 and the huge CPU heatsink, all you can see are neatly routed cables and space for another graphics card or other PCIe peripherals, hard drives or SSDs. Two USB 3.0 ports and the two lockable doors with integrated dust filter are located at the front. The slot for the 5¼-inch drive is located behind the left-hand door, with the large case fan directly underneath. The ventilation slots for the hard drive cages are located behind the right-hand door next to the power and reset switches.
Equipment
As already mentioned, the CPU is the anniversary edition Intel i7 8086 with six cores, which was launched to mark the 40th birthday of the legendary Intel 8086 CPU. The i7 8086 would actually be even faster due to the maximum Turbo Boost of 5 GHz. DAX has slowed down the dynamics of the 8086 somewhat in the BIOS and deliberately sacrificed a little performance in favour of better DPC latency. Paradoxically, this results in more real-time performance, especially in the audio sector.
When selecting the graphics card, DAX opted for a GTX 1070 with 8 Gbytes of RAM, which is cheaper than the Ti version, but not quite as powerful. As with all other workstations in this class, the DAX has 16 Gbytes of RAM memory installed and a 256 Gbyte SSD in the M.2 slot serves as a system hard drive. In addition to the usual suspects such as USB 3.1, 2.0 and Gigabit LAN, there is also a PCIe card with two Thunderbolt 3 Type C ports. This is a useful interface addition for both audio and video, as both high-quality audio interfaces and a wide range of video hardware and monitors can be integrated via Thunderbolt.
Performance
The Intel i7-8086 CPU achieves 1,409 points in the Cinebench 15 multi-CPU test and is therefore only 10 points behind the Intel i7 8700K of the significantly more expensive C1 Animate Ultra from Xi Machines. The V-Ray CPU render test verifies the good Cinebench result with a time of 1:30 – just as fast as the i7 8700K in the CAD Network Creator i7. There was a small surprise with the performance of the GTX 1070, which threw an impressive 165.16 frames per second onto the screen in the Cinebench OpenGL and thus outperformed even the significantly more expensive and actually superior GTX 1080 Ti cards by 5 frames per second. As you can read in the introduction, the Cinebench OpenGL test alone is not suitable for determining the overall performance of a graphics card. However, such a good value in the OpenGL test indicates that everything has been done correctly in the configuration and that the card can develop its full performance without any restrictions. The GTX 1070 also achieves a very good value of 1:30 in the more realistic GPU render test from V-Ray, which is significantly lower than the 1:39 minutes of the GTX 1080 in the Cube XPC. There is also a top value for SSD performance. Although the 256 Gbyte SSD writes 1,470 Mbytes per second, which is about as fast as all other 256 Mbyte SSD modules in the AJA test with 4K full resolution, no one else achieves the read rate of 3,142 Mbytes per second.
With a peak value of 42 microseconds in the latency measurement, one wonders whether an original 8086 CPU from 1978 without interrupt and DMA was installed. The extremely low latency values, as well as the very good price-performance ratio, have become something of a DAX trademark in recent years. No other manufacturer I know of achieves such low latency values. As already mentioned in the introduction, low latency values make particular sense in connection with video/audio applications. For rendering and 3D modelling, low latencies are not absolutely necessary, but they don’t do any harm either.
In the relatively short tests with Cinebench 15 and V-Ray, the DAX workstation remained largely quiet and cool. Even in the CPU stress test with synthetic load under Aida 64, only very quiet fan noises could be heard – the mass of the large CPU fan is noticeable here. In the combined GPU and CPU stress test, however, the noise level was significantly higher due to the GTX 1070’s fans. This problem is shared by all manufacturers who install a graphics card in this performance class (see introduction).
Conclusion
With a price of 2,079 euros, the DAX workstation clearly comes out on top in terms of price-performance ratio. Nevertheless, you don’t get the impression that anything has been skimped on here. The overall workmanship, the housing and the configuration of the operating system and the resulting low latencies are top notch. The same applies to the cooling, which has large reserves and – with the exception of the graphics card – is one of the quietest on the market. It is also interesting to see how a manufacturer that actually specialises in audio workstations can tease out similar or in some cases even higher performance values from a GTX 1070 than the competition is able to achieve with more powerful 1070 Tis or even 1080 Tis. Given the prices currently being charged for graphics cards, this is added value for the customer that should not be underestimated.
Another point that is rare in the fast-moving computer industry is consistency. None of the DAX computers tested in the last 10 years had anything to criticise. Together with Xi Machines and CAD Network, Digital Audionetworx is one of the manufacturers in the performance workstation sector that we can almost give a permanent recommendation based on the good experience we have gained over the years.
By the way: According to DAX, around 50 of the limited Intel 8086 CPUs were still available in mid-July. When these are no longer available, the Intel i7 8700K will be installed at the same price. One final point of criticism: Nowhere on or in the computer is it recognisable that this is an anniversary edition of the Intel i7 8086. A sticker with “Vintage 8086 Inside” would have been nice.
