What does Lenovo have to do with Aston Martin? On Thursday, the PC maker better known for its ThinkPad laptops unveiled the ThinkStation PX workstation and approached the British luxury car maker for help with chassis design.
This is not a trick. With the ThinkStation PX, Lenovo is taking its content creation workstations to even higher levels of performance with two Intel Xeon processors and up to four Nvidia RTX A5000 processors. “Before PX, we’ve never been able to support this many cores and this many GPUs,” said Jennifer Ramsay, senior product manager for workstations at Lenovo.
However, as any PC builder knows, with great power comes great heat. This is where Aston Martin’s expertise in sports car cooling comes into play.
Notice the red accents. Aston Martin helped, but it’s still a Lenovo machine.
Melissa Riofrio/Foundry
Unfortunately, you cannot build this computer at home.
While it is possible to build a very powerful desktop PC, the ThinkStation PX is not something you can replicate using standard hardware. And even if you could afford all the components, the PX motherboard is Lenovo’s own design. As with any legitimate workstation, the level of testing and validation on such a machine far exceeds what most home builders would ever do.
Hardware aside, you also can’t touch the chassis design of the ThinkStation PX. There are many good cases out there, but this one uses the age-old wisdom of Aston Martin sports cars to cool high-end system components.
The Aston Martin DBS features a hexagonal front grille that inspired the chassis design of the Lenovo ThinkStation PX.
Aston Martin
The hexagonal front grille of the ThinkStation PX is reminiscent of the aggressive look of the Aston Martin DBS. Starting at over $333,000, this car is exotic in every way, including the front vent, which is designed to maximize air flow to the 715-horsepower V12 engine.
“For the last 110 years, we have controlled the temperature in cars,” said Cathal Lofnain, director of partnerships at Aston Martin. While Aston Martin came up with a number of designs, the DBS hexagons won out.
This close-up shows the 3D design of the Lenovo ThinkStation with strong ribs.
PH mesh.
Melissa Riofrio / Foundry
Note the conspicuous array of bladed ridges in the pattern. As with DBS, this effect is functional. “The extension vanes further stabilize the airflow to maximize the cooling potential,” Lofnain said. “The deeper the mesh, the better the airflow.”
As air enters the system, Lenovo’s patented three-way cooling baffle (which has been around since 2014) directs separate airflows to the CPU, GPU, and memory. No part should share air heated by another component. This is luxury in PC style.
On the inside of the Lenovo ThinkStation PX’s three-channel cooling pad, you can see individual chambers dedicated to air-cooling each major component.
Melissa Riofrio / Foundry
Ready for the future is another hallmark of the workstation. Lenovo’s Ramsay said that the ThinkStation PX will support the newly announced Nvidia RTX A6000 cards when they become available. Sixteen DIMM slots can accommodate up to 128GB of RAM. We also noted the useful mix of PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5 slots; both 1 Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet; and USB-A and USB-C ports (11 in total).
No wonder this thing weighs over 70 pounds. So, here’s one more thing you won’t find on every PC case: four handles, one at each corner, for easy lifting.
Two CPUs and four GPUs take up a lot of space, but the ThinkStation PX still has plenty of room to expand and connect.
Melissa Riofrio / Foundry
The more I looked at the ThinkStation PX, the more I craved all of its tool-free parts that are also hard to find elsewhere. The three front drive bays have release levers. There is a reset button on the sidebar. The parts of the chassis that are touched by the user are marked in Lenovo red. The 1850W power supply has an unlock lever and a handle. What are the rest of us doing with our damn screwdrivers?
Who needs screwdrivers when there are levers in the drive bays?
Melissa Riofrio/Foundry
So, what is all this performance for?
As if to underscore the stellar power of the ThinkStation PX, Lenovo showed it off in Burbank, California, at the headquarters of renowned client: Dreamworks Animation.
Lenovo technologies – previous generation ThinkStations and water-cooled Neptune servers – have helped Dreamworks animators create the studio’s latest hit. “The art style used in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish required much more computing power,” Lenovo Vice President Rob Herman said during the presentation.
Dreamworks Animation
We watched as Ludo, lead animator at Dreamworks, turned the scene from digital storyboard to rough animation and almost into the final product. Thanks to the processing power of the ThinkStation, incremental changes appeared immediately, whereas before they took time to render with a delay.
Power is at the heart of this Lenovo ThinkStation PX story, as is the case with Aston Martin’s sports car. The executives were crystal clear: Dreamworks is a data business. Whether the data is pixels, retail sales, or medical statistics, managing data to drive efficiency and profit requires powerful technology—workstations, servers, and more—that’s what Lenovo hopes to deliver.