The Celsius W530 is Fujitsu’s new entry-level workstation, a jack-of-all-trades that combines many of the features of the previous generation Celsius W420 and Celsius W520.
It offers plenty of choice for processor, graphics and (particularly) storage, but does so in a mini-tower chassis that comes in at a relatively compact 175 x 419 x 395mm.
Our test machine’s Intel Core i5-4570 is very much at the sweet spot for mainstream 3D CAD. Running at 3.2GHz it provides the all-important raw performance but with no support for Intel Hyper-Threading, those who ray trace render will miss out.
Here, an upgrade to a Hyper-Threaded Core i7 or Xeon E3 v3 should reduce render times by 10%. The Nvidia Quadro K2000 GPU with 2GB of memory is a great fit for mainstream CAD delivering a solid, if not spectacular, score in our Creo test.
Even under our high load tests the Celsius W530 remained incredibly quiet in operation.
Considering this is an entry-level machine the W530power edition can handle some serious storage with support for up to five drives (1 x 2.5-inch and 4 x 2.5/3.5-inch), adding up to an incredible 17TB if you max it out.
With such large capacities available, our test machine’s 1TB Western Digital WD1003FBYX HDD does feel a little anaemic, but it should be noted that this is 1TB of enterprise quality storage, commonly found in read / write-intensive servers.
Standard HDDs are also available, which should save a bit of cash and, for those who place a higher value on performance, there are plenty of SSDs to choose from.
One of the best things about the Celsius W530 is that it is incredibly easy to add or replace drives thanks to Fujitsu’s superb Easyrails, which already populate the easily accessible drive bays.
The W530 is an impressive addition to Fujitsu’s Celsius workstation family and its engineers must be applauded for making maintenance so easy, particularly in an entry-level machine.
At £959 our Celsius W530power edition review machine is also competitively priced, but you can shave £60 off this straight away by opting for the standard Celsius W530 which reduces potential for GPU and hard drive upgrades.
To view comparative scores from other workstations please click here
For details of all our specific CAD/CAM/CAE benchmarks click here
Specifications
» Quad Core Intel Core i5-4570 ‘Haswell’ (3.2GHz)
» 8GB (2 x 4GB) 1,600MHz DDR3 Non-ECC memory
» Nvidia Quadro K2000 (2GB GDDR5) (311.15 driver)
» 1TB Western Digital WD1003FBYX hard drive
» Fujitsu motherboard (Intel C226 chipset)
» Microsoft Windows 8 Professional 64-bit (Win 7 available)
» 3 year on site warranty
CPU benchmarks
(secs – smaller is better)
CAM (Delcam PowerMill 2010) – 1) 170 2) 300 3) 438
CAE (SolidWorks 2010 Simulation) – 94
Rendering (3ds Max Design 2011) – 309
Graphics benchmarks
(bigger is better)
CAD (SolidWorks 2013 – SPECapc graphics composite) – N/A (benchmark does not run on Windows 8)
CAD (Creo 2.0 – SPECapc graphics test) – 4.19
Quad Core Intel Core i5-4570 ‘Haswell’ (3.2GHz)
8GB (2 x 4GB) 1,600MHz DDR3 Non-ECC memory
Nvidia Quadro K2000 (2GB GDDR5) (311.15 driver)
Fujitsu motherboard (Intel C226 chipset)
1TB Western Digital WD1003FBYX hard drive
3 year on site warranty
N/A
170
300
438
94
309
N/A
