IBM Think Center S50: The Ideal Corporate Small Form Factor
by Wesley Fink on October 21, 2003 10:55 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Final Words
The IBM Think Center S50 is the first of many Corporate desktop computers we plan to test in upcoming months. It is quite clear in our look at the S50 that its reason for being is to lower “Cost-of-Ownership”, and in particular, service costs to the absolute minimum. This is evident in the screwless “user-serviceable” features of virtually every component in the S50. It is then extended with IBM's System Migration Assistant and Rapid Restore Ultra software that can manage moving data and applications from your old system and fixing hard-drive crashes, corruption, and failures. Finally, IBM even designates the S50 a “Workhorse Model”, an option that guarantees no planned hardware or software updates or changes for 12 months. If we evaluate the Think Center S50 on the basis of meeting the design goal of a very low “Cost-of-Ownership”, then the Think Center S50 is a brilliant design and an unqualified success.Another area where the IBM is without peer is in quiet operation. Our measurements show the Think Center is 2 to 8 times quieter than the “quietest” SFF machines we have tested. The IBM is as close to silent as will likely be found in a small computer. IT departments concerned about computer noise disturbing productivity of other workers will be completely pleased with the ultra-quiet S50.
Then we get to the thorny Performance area. This is not the most important area to most Corporate IT and Purchasing departments, but it is hard to overlook benchmarks that show the IBM S50 as a dismal performer in Content Creation — benchmarks made up of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other common programs used in most every Corporate computing environments. Unfortunately, in those benchmarks, an S50 with a 3.2GHz processor performs some 10% to 20% poorer than other 865 chipset machines with 3.0GHz processors. Frankly, we wish we knew why the Think Center S50 is such a poor performer, but we don't. We tested with 2 DIMMs to make sure we were enabling Dual-Channel mode, and even checked performance against the single Infineon DIMM to make certain we were not overlooking something. No matter what we did, Content Creation performance was lackluster. We even tried Sysmark 2002 on the chance that the Veritest Winstones might be the culprit, but Sysmark just confirmed what we had found. Sysmark 2002 scores were 403 for Internet Content Creation and 156 for Office Productivity — neither are very good results for a 3.2GHz Pentium 4.
Whatever the reasons for the lackluster performance, we would recommend that IBM take a close look at system performance and fix it. The Think Center S50 is just too good not to perform at the top of its class in every area.
For the Corporate Desktop, the IBM Think Center S50 is an ideal machine. It is small, taking up very little space. It is well-equipped and has the options most Corporate clients want. The S50 sets new standards in quiet and can be considered silent. “Cost-of-Ownership” was a serious concern to the S50 design team and it shows. All-in-all, it is hard to fault the S50 in any of these areas. The Performance in standard Corporate software, however, is substandard and IBM needs to correct this quickly. We have no trouble recommending the S50 to Corporate IT Departments and Purchasing groups. It's a great choice — provided that you demand better performance than it now delivers and verify that it delivers those performance improvements in your qualification testing.
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mindless1 - Sunday, February 8, 2004 - link
It's a shame the article uses proprietary SWF images, instead of the industry standard formats which everyone can use. Is the author getting kickbacks from Macromedia?Budman - Wednesday, November 5, 2003 - link
asdadadUtterman - Friday, October 24, 2003 - link
I have deployed around 1500 IBM thinkcentre S50's nationwide and they are really great systems to work with. Out of the 1500 systems that I worked with, I only had problems with 5 of them. This review is pretty dead on with everything about the S50. I find they are great systems to use for an office environment, but anything that needs a lot of performance prob. should look at something higher end.Shalmanese - Thursday, October 23, 2003 - link
It has always been my private opinion that Content creation is only related to typical buisness usage in that it has the same range of applications. However, saying that a 10% difference in content creation will translate into a 10% difference in real world buisness usage is like saying a 50% increase in memory bandwidth will lead to a correspondingly large increase in bandwidth intensive applications. The dillema is that any benchmarking utility that simulated TRUE desktop performance would be of no use as a benchmarking utility. Over the span of an 8 hour workday, the difference between a fast and slow computer may be 30 seconds worth of extra wait time if that. Also, the S50 is offered at every speed from a 2Ghz Celeron to a 3.2Ghz P4. Obviously, they would ship you the most expensive model to review but the vast majority sold are going to be in the mid range.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 22, 2003 - link
The lack of CPU cooling fan concerns me. I've got a couple hundred SFF Dell OptiPlex machines throughout my office and I sleep better knowing the CPU has its own active cooling. Too many machines are shoved into areas that don't provide enough airflow for effective convection cooling, and we all know what that eventually leads to.And as for the 2-3 year lease deals, I think one of the good things to come out of the "dot bomb" era is that companies are demanding more from their equipment. Short-term lifespans may be great for the business models of technology companies but those of use in old-economy industries have a different idea of what a machine's expected lifespan should be. Mind you we're not using Commodore 64s for anything, but a four-year-old P3/500 runs Windows 2000 and MS Office just fine for your typical office worker. And that is where a business-oriented machine really shines- it's much easier to keep a fleet of old OptiPlexes or HP Vectras running smoothly than a hodge-podge of no-name machines.
sprockkets - Wednesday, October 22, 2003 - link
The only thing I care about is how a stupid 3.2ghz 82 watt minimum processor can be cooled with such a dinky heatsink and quiet small fans. It like all other OEM cooled processors run at around 80c. They won't let you see the temperature for obvious reasons, since while a processor can run at 80c it will last much longer at cooler temps. And if you want stability you need to keep stuff cool.Also a 3db increase in sound is not twice as loud. A 10db increase is. But that doesn't take into perception of how annoying something can sound. For instance, a computer I have at home is just a little wider than a pci slot, so it has it's cd-rw drive vertically. The ps fan on it is on the outside and is only 60mm and 10mm thick. It gets very loud due to it getting rid of the heat in the system. In fact, it's loud whether I have a 800mhz duron or 1800+ Tbred. But then I took it to a reception hall and put it on stage I could barely tell it was on. So while it may sound quiet in a open building in a business, it will sound very loud at home. But that's just me and one observation.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 22, 2003 - link
Interesting review. I just picked-up a stack of Small Forms for my company…the IBM small form was one I rejected, basically because it looks so bad….amongst other rejected systems including HP/Compaq, Dell(which is now absolutely prohibited from conducting business with my company – different story) and Micron.I ended up, at $600.00 per machine, with Gateway E4100s. Celeron 2.4s with 256 dual-channel DDR, Intel MoBo and basically the same chassis….only not as tacky looking as the IBMs. They’re also completely silent.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 22, 2003 - link
I implement machines for small to mid-size companies in the Pacific Northwest. My recommendation and what I am hearing in the field is that there is very little need to renew leases from 2-3 years ago. User's themselves are seeing little to no benefit for getting the latest and greatest. People want their jobs, not more PC's brought in. There really aren't many apps that take advantage of the speed for most cases. People aren't rendering here or playing games, folks.Having said that we buy mostly small form factor PC's, and we buy mosltly HP. We used to buy Dell but saw their support go absolutely downhill in the last 2 years. Without Support why buy from these companies at all? Anyway, now we're just considering getting shuttles or vanilla brand. The only parts that really fail anymore are HDD's (and do they ever fail, the failure rate is about 10% easy across all manufacturer's of IDE, which is a lot)
We can save a customer roughly $200-$300 by just getting no-name brand boxes like shuttle, etc, over IBM/HP. It's something we're seriously considering.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 22, 2003 - link
Regarding the mysterious lower performance of the IBM S50, I think the clue must be the memory speed because 320MHz memory is bizarre when dual 400MHz is the design for this processor. This means one of two things...1) Asynchronous mode - if the S50 uses asynchronous memory timing, we all know that this reduces performance. We've seen many tests where 266 MHz synchronous is faster than 333MHz asynchronous. Also, to my knowledge, the P4 3.2 is made for dual channel 400MHz (800MHz effective) so running a 320MHz DIMM in single channel (320MHz) or dual channel (640MHz) mode WILL DEFINITELY hurt performance since the long pipelines in the P4 and the very high 3.2GHz speed are very dependent on avoiding any kind of wait on memory (a lower speed P4 such as 2GHz would be affected less). If true, this would be a double oversight.
OR
2) Synchronous mode - if the S50 uses dual channel memory in synchronous mode and they limit the speed of each bank to 320 MHz, then the fixed multiplier of the CPU must result in an actual CPU clock speed of 2.56 GHz rather than 3.20 GHz. If true, this is a simple case of underclocking.
Either way this is a strange decision by IBM.
--charlesz (waiting on my AnandTech password).
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, October 22, 2003 - link
As stated in the review, stability and trouble-free operation are MUCH more important to IT Departments than performance will ever be. We did not test the IBM S50 as we would an Enthusiast machine since that is not appropriate. In fact, we ONLY ran Content Creation and General Usage benchmarks because these are made up of the kinds of applications Corporations normally use on their desktops. The IBM was at least 10 to 20% slower in those benchmarks than any other 865/865G we have tested. That is significant enough that we think it WILL interest some, if not all, IT departments.The IBM deserves the praise we gave on Engineering and low noise levels, but someone should be questioning the dismal performance we found in Corporate applications suites. If my IT department specified 3.2GHz P4s I would certainly expect to see performance in that neighborhood, and not performance more typical of a 2.6GHz CPU.