IBM Think Center S50

Zitat

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.