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There's no doubting the capabilities of the Venom 2401-12T which takes full advantage of the performance boost offered by the Haswell Xeon processors and DDR4 RAM. The only real issue is the price tag which at £9,670 (around $15,140, AU$18,090) excluding taxes seems, at first glance, rather steep.
However, almost half of this is down to the Quadro K6000 GPU which we found selling by itself for just over £4,000 (around $6,260, AU$7,480). Take that into account and the new processors and all that RAM seems like something of a bargain.
Moreover, design and digital professionals looking for the ultimate in graphics performance are unlikely to be deterred by the price. If they are, they can always opt for a lower spec and/or a cheaper GPU, while others with deeper pockets have scope to add even more to the mix.
We liked
The new Haswell-based Xeon processors are a welcome addition to the workstation world, particularly when combined with high-end GPUs like the Quadro K6000, enabling the end results to deliver a significant step up in performance when running video-intensive design and modelling applications.
Boston clearly understand the needs of this market and has opted for the workstation-specific Xeon E5 SKU as well as the Quadro K6000 GPU, all rounded off with liquid cooling to avoid any overheating issues.
We disliked
To our eyes the storage side of the equation seemed to be a little lacking. We would have liked more SSD capacity, and preferably with the operating system being booted from flash too. Still, that's easy enough to fix and there's certainly scope to add more disks inside the roomy tower, although the design aesthetics may not be to every taste.
Final verdict
It may seem expensive but you do get value for money with the new Boston Venom which uses the latest Haswell-based Xeon processors to extract the maximum possible benefit from the high-end Nvidia Quadro K6000 GPU.
It's not for everyone, but if you're a graphics professional or design engineer this workstation could significantly bolster your productivity and be worth paying extra for, plus there's scope to lower the cost for those with more limited budgets.
