IBM Think Center S50: The Ideal Corporate Small Form Factor

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.