Dell Precision 7920 Workstation Tower

Description

The system may look similar to the previous generation but make no mistake, the Dell Precision 7920 Workstation tower has been completely redesigned from the ground up. It features an advanced cooling and thermal design with storage devices and power on one side of the chassis, and motherboard, CPUs, memory, and PCIe cards on the other side. Fans throughout the system keep it all cool. One of the more interesting features on the new Precision workstations are up front, hot-swap drive trays that support M.2 and U.2 drives for vastly improved storage options. As always, Dell’s Precision workstations support a number of ISV certified applications for trouble-free performance. Intel Xeon Scalable processors deliver more performance and support for up to 3TB of memory and room for up to 10 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch storage devices—not including PCIe-card storage devices.

Performance

With one or two Intel Xeon Scalable processors, the Dell 7920 workstation can power through the most demanding applications, quickly. Scalable processors also support six memory channels per processor for increased throughput but if you want support for the 3TB of memory, you will need a CPU with an “M” suffix. Only those processors with an “M” included at the end of the model number support 1.5TB of memory modules, each. Without the “M” you can only install 768GB per processor.

Storage

You can install up to eight SATA drives supported by an onboard HD/RAID controller but beyond eight drives you will need a discrete HD/RAID controller. Using a Broadcom MegaRAID 9460-16i HD/RAID controller, the Precision 7920 will support up to 10 x 2.5-inch and or 3.5-inch SATA/SAS HDDs or SSDs. That number includes up to four M.2 or U.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs, which can now be mounted in proprietary hot-swap front drive bays. Additional storage of up to eight M.2 storage devices can be installed using Dell’s UltraSpeed Quad or Duo (PCIe M.2 Interposer) cards.

Memory

With a 6-channel memory architecture, memory throughput is greatly enhanced compared to only four memory channels per processor supported on the previous generation Precision 7910 tower, which featured Intel’s Xeon E5-2600 v4 processors. Loading 128GB DDR4 Load-Reduced (LRDIMM) memory modules in all 24 slots will provide up to 3TB of system memory operating at a top speed of 2666MHz, when paired with select processors. With a single processor, and again using LRDIMMs, you can achieve half that value. Registered (RDIMM) memory modules will support half the capacity of LRDIMMs at 1.5TB with two processors using 64GB memory modules in all slots.

Expansion

There are seven PCIe 3.0 slots on the Precision 7920 system board. Only five of those slots are active with a single processor. You can install four generic graphics cards or up to three 250W high-end GPUs from Nvidia or AMD. Two Dell’s UltraSpeed Quad or four UltraSpeed Duo cards are also supported offering up to 8 x more M.2 drives. In order to support configurations using SAS drives or if you want to install more than 8x SATA drives then you will need an optional HD/RAID controller. Generous expansion slots front, and back provide more ports for connecting external devices. The front 5.25-inch media bay can also be converted to support additional storage or an optional Thunderbolt card or Dell Audio module for vastly improved audio compared to a standard audio card.

Management

Dell’s Precision Optimizer is available for free download and helps you get the most out of the ISV certified programs on the system by optimizing settings based on your specific configuration. Security features include I/O Interface Security, which gives you the ability to disable ports throughout the workstation. Additional options include lockable power supplies and a Kensington cable. Several softwre features also help secure your workstation and data, including, Dell Data Guardian and Dell Endpoint Security Suite Enterprise.

Summary

The Dell Precision 7920 Workstation Tower supports almost eight times more memory than the next most powerful workstation Dell offers. With two top-of-the-line Intel Xeon Scalable processors, the 7920 Tower will support up to 3TB of memory, and up to 48TB of storage to power through the most complex and demanding applications quickly and efficiently. M.2 drives are also significantly more accessible with Dell’s front-loading, M.2 trays with integrated hot-swap caddies.