Tony359 wrote:For service and support and consistency across the company.
A large corporation needs ONE player to deal with all the computer HW. So you get Lenovo, HP, Dell. They will supply the HW, it's going to be all the same, they'll look after drivers, BIOS, everything.
It would be unthinkable for a corporation to build their own machines or support them - or ask a random third party to build custom machines for them and then ending up with gazillion models of hardware, bios, firmware etc.
Also large computer brands offer aggressive service contracts - sometimes with very short SLA - which are clearly necessary when the HW is being used in a critical business environment.
Absolutely nothing to do with reliability. If you were right, how come Pugebench systems are not based on those super-reliable systems you talk about?
Well, I am not talking about corporations, I am talking about production houses and studios and even home studios.
As an electronics engineer for 29+ years, my advices are not based on theories, but on real-world experiences of mine and of others in the industry.
This will be the last time to discuss this topic, so allow me to share one story. When I started my production company in 2008, I had a debate with Avid trying to convince them to use AVID Symphony Nitris DX with my custom build, dual Xeon, dual GPU workstation which costed me around $23K! I carefully selected the best and most reliable component to build that workstation, yet Avid refused to provide support to Symphony if I decided to install it in a non-certified workstation. They said Avid is the industry standard, and from their long-term experience in the industry testing different brands of workstations, they selected the most reliable then did even more tastings, optimizing their software for those specific machines to achieve maximum stability and performance. That makes perfect sense as they can this way eliminate almost all variables when troubleshooting, thus they don’t provide support if their software not installed in non-certified machines.
To be in the safe side, I had to buy one of the certified models, at the time the list was limited to select workstations from HP and Apple. Nowadays, they also include workstation from Dell and Lenovo. I paid $85K for the whole system, $40K for hardware and $45K for the Symphony Nitris DX system. The HP workstation itself had a similar specs to my self-build workstation, yet it cost $4,000 more! I believed that it was just overpriced for the "brand name" and it wouldn’t perform any better than my self-build system and I was right as perfomrnace was the same in both workstations. But after months of extensive testing, I relized I was wrong! . Although Symphony and AfterEffets performed similarly in both systems, stability was a different story. Using the exact same project files and plug ins, the HP was truly “rock solid” as Symphony and Aftereffects didn’t crash once, when it crashed multiple times on my “beast”
The HP system was in many cases running 24 hours for several days rendering projects, yet still rock solid. After 7 years, I only replaced its DVD burner and just one HDD in the AVID VideoRAID SR unit.
That was just one of many experiences I had on the business side and it’s no difference on my personal computers since I switched to HP workstations in the last 12 years. My experince were based on 2 laptop workstations; Zbook G3 and Zbook Studio G5, one AIO workstation; Z1 G3 and on 2 mini dektop workstations; Z2 G5 Mini and lately HP Z2 G9 Mini. All my old workstations are still working fine and I only upgraded to get the latest and fastest.
Some brands are known for quality and reliability and this is true in all fields like cars, TVs, batteries, memories, storages, motherboards..... etc. Reputation of quality, dependability and reliability doesn’t come from vacuum. Some computer companies do indeed invest to make sure their products meets certain qualities known in the industry. Surly I am not advising to blindly buy any product they put their logo on it, not at all, I am specifically talking about their workstation-class products. I am also expecting the same from other reputable brands like Dell, Boxx, Lenovo, Asus .. etc.
I happily provide advices based on my own and on many others experiences and it’s up to you to take or reject it and buy whatever you like.. at the end, I am not gaining or losing anything.
Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2025 8:19 pm
