Editor's Pick: The BOXX APEXX 2 2402

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

 BOXX Technologies does overclocked workstations like the sun rises and sets. It’s their nature. So eyebrows rose when they took the wraps off their new APEXX 2 2402 workstation and called it their “premier workstation for applications where the majority of work is single threaded.” Today’s Pick of the Week write-up has many specs on the highly configurable APEXX 2 2402 workstation, so let’s look at what’s going on here.

To begin, when you’re talking about engineering applications where the majority of work is single threaded you mean CAD, 3D modeling and rendering — tools like CATIA, SOLIDWORKS, Autodesk 3ds Max or KeyShot. Most CAD tasks require a single core. Rendering can use more. Still, the point is that you can add cores to your heart’s content, but CAD will not benefit. What you need is a faster infrastructure to process tasks.

BOXX engineered the APEXX 2 2402 workstation for single-threaded applications in two key ways. For one, it’s built with a quad-core Intel 6th Generation Core i7-6700K 4GHz processor that BOXX overclocked to 4.4GHz. Overclocked is a big deal here. It means a sustained 4.4GHz rate across all cores.

Now, turbo boosting might jack up to a higher frequency, but it’s a temporary increase that lasts only until something comes up in your workload that requires the CPU’s services. The APEXX 2 2402’s nonstop extra frequency translates into a continuous productivity enhancement across processes, which will come in really handy when you’re doing rebuilds, opening huge assemblies and the like. As well, the multi-core CPU running faster will boost rendering times.

Next, a recommended APEXX 2 2402 comes with a CAD-friendly 16GB of DDR4 memory, upgradable to 64GB. DDR means double data rate. In other words, fast bandwidth that keeps processes moving briskly. The recommended APEXX 2 2402 also comes with a 2GB NVIDIA Quadro K620 graphics accelerator, which handles a lot of compute-intensive work so that the CPU does not have to fuss with it. And that makes everything faster too.

The takeaway here is that the APEXX 2 2402’s prime components are tuned to make single-threaded applications ultra-efficient. To give you an idea, linked off today’s Pick of the Week write-up is a review of the APEXX 2 2402’s predecessor. Given its lineage, the APEXX 2 2402 workstation could have you looking at your CAD applications in a whole new light.

Thanks, Pal. — Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Learn more about the APEXX 2 2402 here.