Demanding users who need the expansive capacity and roaring muscle of a high-end desktop should look no further than the Dell Precision T5500 workstation. Dell, which frequently wins our reviews of workstations and high-end systems, shows its prowess once again with this machine, which is faster than its competitors and consumes less power.
In fact, this year's 12-core model, which uses a pair of 6-core Westmere processors running at 3.3GHz, consumes less power than last year's 8-core model. This means that within a smaller power envelope, you get 50 percent more computing capability and the RAM capacity of a server. Given that the graphics card in our tests were identical, it's clear that Dell (and Intel) managed to squeeze every bit of stray power consumption from the workstation without cutting delivered horsepower. We expect other vendors -- notably HP and Lenovo -- will do the same soon, but Dell got it done first.
