Big Workstation Performance Comes in a Small Package

The push to pack more performance into smaller and lighter mobile devices marches on, yet professional workstations have remained at heavy-weight status, commanding ample desktop space and drawing significant power.

BOXX Technologies is committed to leveraging the latest innovations to meet the needs of its customers, including shrinking the footprint of professional workstations. Joining the BOXX lineup is the APEXX 1, the smallest overclocked liquid workstation built to date, which in concert with a redesigned and size matched rendering companion, delivers a turbocharged workflow for engineering applications like SolidWorks, KeyShot, and Autodesk 3DS Max.

Small Size, Big Performance

With a footprint that is 25% the size of the current offerings in the APEXX line, the APEXX 1 is a mini-ITX form-factor desktop workstation with a uni-body core that is available with overclocked Intel Core i7 processors with up to 8 cores or Intel Xeon processors with up to 18 cores. Despite its compact form factor, the APEXX 1 doesn’t skimp on workstation-class features: The system can house a pair of 2.5-in. drives with an optional M.2 PCI-Express SSD for four times the punch of a standard SSD, an NVIDIA Quadro graphics card that can drive four 4K monitors, and the unique BOXX liquid cooling solution designed to ensure long-term workstation stability and performance.

Overclocking and offloading are the keys to BOXX’s unique workflow and what sets its workstations apart from the competition. The panning, zooming, and opening and closing of large assemblies common to CAD software are single-threaded tasks, thus they benefit from higher frequency CPUs, not additional cores. On the other hand, performance of multithreaded tasks like simulation and rendering profit immensely from multiple CPU cores, but with the increase of cores comes a drop in frequency, impeding the performance of single-threaded tasks. Typically, professionals have to compromise, but that’s not the case with BOXX. The BOXX solution addresses both by pairing overclocked CPUs with the renderPRO desk-side rendering companion and orchestrating a seamless workflow between them.

The APEXX 1 offers overclocked performance in a small form factor. Image courtesy of BOXX Technologies.

BOXX has a long history of working with chip makers like Intel to safely leverage overclocking technologies to achieve faster speeds over the base frequency of 3.7 GHz, translating into optimized engineering workflows, greater efficiencies, higher productivity, and a better overall user experience for those multithreaded applications.

“We strive to solve everyday workflow bottlenecks for the creative professional,” says Shoaib Mohammad, vice president of Marketing and Business at BOXX. “One of the ways we do that is by eliminating CPU bottlenecks found in single-threaded and multi-threaded applications through professional overclocking. We’ve continuously set the bar for performance and reliability.”

An Optimized Workflow

The APEXX 1’s small footprint is matched by the all new renderPRO 1, which allows up to 18 Xeon cores to be stacked on top of one another for space savings. This potent combination delivers unbeatable performance for professional-grade design, rendering and simulation applications without wholly consuming the desktop.

With this setup, BOXX workstations shift computationally intensive tasks for rendering or simulation work to the renderPRO 1 node, which serves as a desktop render farm without the expense and without the computational-intensive workloads being a drain on the core system. The renderPRO 1 functions as a single machine and is configured as a network-connected device, making it accessible to anyone on the network.

To find out more about the streamlined APEXX 1 and BOXX’s unique workflow, go to BOXX Technologies.