IBM Think Center S50: The Ideal Corporate Small Form Factor

IBM Think Center S50: The Test

One of the decisions made when designing the IBM Think Center S50 was to remove any possibility of upgrading the on-board Intel Extreme Graphics 2. Without any kind of AGP port, there is no effective way of upgrading video except by using a PCI graphics card, which are rare and getting rarer.

The lack of a video upgrade option is not a real issue where the S50 will be used, but it makes it impossible for us to mount our standard ATI 9800 PRO graphics card for a full suite of Benchmark tests.

IBM supplied our Evaluation Unit with a 3.2GHz P4 and a single 512Mb Infineon DDR333 CAS 2.5 DIMM. To be consistent with our other benchmarks, our limited testing used our standard 2 x 512Mb PC3500 Mushkin Level 2 memory. CPU-Z confirmed the Mushkin was running at DDR320 at 2-2-2-5 timings. Just to double-check, we also ran the Content Creation benchmarks with the stock Infineon memory. Performance in the benchmarks was a couple of points lower in either test with the stock Infineon memory. Reported results are with 2 x 512mb Mushkin at DDR320 2-2-2-5.

Performance Test Configuration
Processor(s):	Intel 3.2 800FSB Pentium 4
RAM:	2 x 512MB Mushkin PC3500 Level II DS 2 x 256MB Corsair 3200LL SS
Hard Drive(s):	Maxtor 120GB 7200 RPM (8MB Buffer) Western Digital 120GB 7200 RPM (8MB Buffer)
Bus Master Drivers:	Intel INF Update v5.00.1012 Intel IAA for 875P RAID not installed for consistency of Test Results
Video Card(s):	On-board Intel Extreme Graphics ATI Radeon 9800 PRO 128MB (AGP 8X)
Video Drivers:	Intel 82865G Graphics Controller 6.13.10.3510 ATI Catalyst 3.7
Operating System(s):	Windows XP Professional SP1
Motherboards:	IBM Think Center S50 Soltek Qubic EQ3401M Biostar iDEQ 200T @ 200.8 MHz Shuttle XPC SB65G2 (865PE) @ 200.5 MHz Asus P4C800-E (875P) @ 200.5 MHz ABIT IS7-G (865PE) ABIT IC7-G (875P) Gigabyte 8KNXP (875P)

Recent performance tests on Intel 875/865 boards used 2 x 512MB Mushkin PC3500 Level II Double-bank memory. Previous tests of Intel motherboards used 2 x 256MB Corsair 3200LL Version 1.1.

All performance tests with the ATI 9800 PRO 128MB video card were run with the AGP Aperture set to 128MB with Fast Write enabled. Resolution in all benchmarks is 1024x768x32.

Additions to Performance Tests

We have standardized on ZD Labs Internet Content Creation Winstone 2003 and ZD Labs Business Winstone 2002 for system benchmarking. We are no longer reporting SysMark2002 results as part of our standard benchmark suite.




As much as we appreciate the superb engineering that went into the design of the IBM Think Center S50, the actual performance of the machine was very disappointing. Content Creation benchmarks usually remain similar whether we are testing with on-board graphics or a $400 video card. However, the S50, while running a faster 3.2GHz while other machines ran 3.0, still posted the lowest performance in Content Creation of any Pentium 4 that we have recently tested. It appears that IBM's decision to use DDR320 (DDR333) instead of DDR400 coupled with other design decisions have combined to lower performance significantly. Stability and compatibility matter most on the Corporate desktop, but we doubt most IT departments will be happy to see the IBM Think Center with an expensive 3.2GHz P4 actually performing 10% to 20% slower than other 865 machines that we have tested with a 3.0GHz P4.

We suspect that this could be a significant issue to corporate purchasing and IT groups, since our performance benchmarking only tested Content Creation and General Usage — suites with Word, Excel, Power Point, and Multimedia Content, those applications that are the bread-and-butter of the Corporate PC.