What does Lenovo have to do with Aston Martin? On Thursday, the PC maker best known for its ThinkPad laptops unveiled the ThinkStation PX workstation and turned to the British luxury carmaker for help with its chassis design.
This is not a trick. With the ThinkStation PX, Lenovo is taking its content creation workstations to an even higher level of performance: two Intel Xeon and up to four Nvidia RTX A5000. “Before the PX, we’ve never been able to support so many cores and so many GPUs,” said Jennifer Ramsay, Lenovo’s senior worldwide workstation product manager.
However, as any PC builder knows, with great power comes great heat. That’s where Aston Martin’s expertise in sports car cooling comes into play.
Note the red accents. Aston Martin helped, but it’s still very much a Lenovo machine.
Melissa Riofrio/Foundry
Sorry, you can’t build this PC at home
While it’s possible to build a very powerful desktop PC, the ThinkStation PX isn’t something you can replicate using off-the-shelf hardware. And even if you could afford all the components, the PX’s motherboard is Lenovo’s in-house design. As with any legitimate workstation, the level of testing and validation that goes into a machine like this far exceeds what most home builders would do.
Beyond the hardware, you can’t touch the ThinkStation PX’s chassis design either. There are plenty of good cases out there, but this one wields a century of Aston Martin sports car wisdom to cool down the high-end parts of the system.
The Aston Martin DBS has a hexagonal front grille which inspired the design of the Lenovo ThinkStation PX chassis.
Aston Martin
The ThinkStation PX’s hexagonal front grill mimics the aggressive look of the Aston Martin DBS. That car, which starts at more than $333,000, is exotic in every possible way, including its front vent, which is designed to maximize airflow to the 715-horsepower V12 engine.
“We’ve spent the last 110 years managing heat in cars,” said Cathal Loughnane, Aston Martin’s director of partnerships. While Aston Martin came up with a number of designs, DBS’s hexagons won out.
This close-up shows the three-dimensional, grooved design of the Lenovo ThinkStation
PX grid.
Melissa Riofrio / Casting
Note the prominent array of blade-like ridges in the pattern. As with DBS, this effect is functional. “The extension blades further stabilize the airflow to maximize cooling potential,” Loughnane said. “The deeper the grill, the better the airflow.”
As air is drawn into the system, Lenovo’s proprietary three-channel cooling baffle (which has been around since 2014) routes separate airflows over the CPU, GPU, and memory. No individual part has to share air heated by another component. This is luxury, PC style.
On the inner side of Lenovo ThinkStation PX’s three-channel cooling baffle, you can see the separate chambers that dedicate cooling air to each major component.
Melissa Riofrio / Casting
Future-proofing is another hallmark of workstations. Lenovo’s Ramsay said the ThinkStation PX will accommodate the recently announced Nvidia RTX A6000 cards when they become available. Sixteen DIMM slots can accommodate up to 128 GB of RAM. We also note the useful mix of PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5 slots; 1 Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet; and USB-A and USB-C ports (11 total).
No wonder, this thing weighs over 70 pounds. So here’s another thing you won’t find in every PC case: four handles, one in each corner, to make it easier to carry.
Dual CPUs and four GPUs take up a lot of space, but the ThinkStation PX still has plenty of room for expansion and connectivity.
Melissa Riofrio / Casting
The more I looked at the ThinkStation PX, the more I coveted all its tool-free details, hard to find elsewhere, too. The three front drive bays have release levers. There is a release button on the side panel. User-touchable parts inside the case are marked Lenovo red. The 1850 W power supply has a release lever and a handle. What are the rest of us doing with our damn screwdrivers?
Who needs screwdrivers when your drive bays have crowbars?
Melissa Riofrio/Foundry
So what is all this performance for?
As if to highlight the stellar power of the ThinkStation PX, Lenovo showed it off at the Burbank, California headquarters of a celebrity client: Dreamworks Animation.
Lenovo’s technology, its previous generation of ThinkStations, plus its water-cooled Neptune servers, helped the animators at Dreamworks create the studio’s latest hit. “The pictorial style used in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish it required a lot more computing power,” Lenovo Vice President Rob Herman said during the presentation.
dreamworks animation
We watched as Ludo, a leading animator at Dreamworks, took a scene from a digital storyboard to a rough animation to a near-final product. Thanks to the ThinkStation’s computing power, incremental changes appeared immediately, where previously they would have required a delay to render.
Power is at the heart of this Lenovo ThinkStation PX story, just as it would in an Aston Martin sports car. The executives were very clear: Dreamworks is a data business. Whether the data is pixels, retail sales, or healthcare statistics, managing data for efficiency and profit requires powerful technology: workstations, servers, and more. That’s what Lenovo hopes to deliver.
