A powerful portable
powerhouse
Mobile
workstations will never replace a monster
powerful desktop with dual processors and dual
or Quad AIBs, and a 1200W power supply to keep
all that stuff humming. But if you don’t need,
or can afford a monster system like that, then
you have some very exciting choices in mobile
workstations. We’ve looked at several here in Mt
Tiburon Testing Labs, and this week we’re
putting the very capable @Xi PowerGo 15/7.
The unit comes with a
15.3" screen with of resolution of 1920x1080 in
a sculpted charcoal gray clamshell case
measuring 16.46×11.10×1.52 in.(W×D×H) inches. It
only weighs 4.1 pounds , 5.11 including the
power supply, pound for pound the Xi provides
the mobile user top flight performance.

@XI Computer’s PowerGo mobile workstation
(not actual product images)
Inside that chassis is a 2.8 GHz Intel Core
i7-7700HQ with 16GB cache, 32GB DDR4 RAM running
at 2666MHz, a 512GB Samsung SSD 960 PRO , and a
Nvidia Quadro P3000 with 62MB of GDDR5 memory
and 1280 CUDA cores. All that for $2499.
We compared it to Jon’s
favorite mobile workstation, the Dell precision
5510. The 5510 measures 14.06×9.27×0.45 in., and
weighs 4.5 pounds with a 130-watt power supply.
The Dell Precision 5510 comes
with a 2.80GHz Xeon CPU E3-1505M v5 processor
with 8MB cache, 32GB DDR4 RAM running at
2666MHz, 512 GB SSD, and a Nvidia Quadro M1000M
with 2GB of GDDR4 memory and 640 CUDA cores for
a mere $2,549 which includes Windows 10 pro. The
screen however, is 3840x2160 (Res for SPEC
1900x1060).

Dell’s Precision 5510 mobile
workstation
The two machines aren’t of the
same class, the Precision 5510 was released in
Q1 2016 so the comparisons won’t be completely
balanced. We ran Spec Viewperf 12.1 WPC on both
machines and got the following results.

Benchmark comparisons of two
mobile workstations (Higher is better)
The average of the difference
in scores was (put your seat belt on)—237%! Now
take a second and let that sink in. First of
all, the Dell Precision 5510 is an extremely
capable and enjoyable machine, and we haven’t
found a job it couldn’t do. When you start with
that and almost 3X performance, that is an
astounding accomplishment.
Using the power supply
ratings, we did a Pmark calculation, and came up
with the following:

One of the joys of this job is
the opportunity to play with and spend some time
with some of the worlds most amazing machines.
Putting the @XI PowerGo up against the Dell
Precision 5510 was a real treat. 
What do we think?
The Xi PowerGo is an impressive machine, the
performace that OEMs are able to squeeze into
these thin form factors is truly amazing. In the
future JPR is going to add another "P" to the
Pmark for laptops, P for pounds. It doesn’t take
much imagination to realize that any machine
that can deliver almost 300% the performance and
32% better Pmark than a machine that is a year
order is an excellent price-performance value. |