Dell Claims It’s Precision 3680 Tower Workstation With Intel Core i9-14900K CPU Offers “World’s Fastest Single-Threaded” Performance

Dell has unveiled its latest workstation tower, the Precision 3680, which it says offers the world's fastest single-threaded performance using the Intel Core i9-14900K CPU.

As a part of its 2024 commercial announcements, Dell unveiled the Precision 3680 Tower PC, a fully decked-out workstation that features up to an Intel Core i9-14900K CPU. The workstation supports up to 128 GB DDR5-4400 memory, 3 M.2 NVMe & 3 2.5-inch SATA HDDs, and up to an NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada or AMD Pro W7900 GPU, all within Dell's standard black chassis. For cooling, the workstation is equipped with a choice of premium or standard air coolers.

The thing that caught my attention was the fact that Dell mentioned that the Precision 3680 Tower offers the world's fastest single-threaded performance on a workstation which is achieved by using an unlimited turbo duration by making the chip run at over 250W all the time. So essentially, Dell is not breaking the rules here and simply running the 14900K CPU at its max PL2 limit which is 253W, all the time, and that makes sure that the workstation doesn't breach the warranty guidelines set by Intel by overclocking the chip.

The most important factor here would be cooling as we know, the Intel Core i9-14900K CPU is very much prone to stability issues when running at higher temperatures and higher wattage. Dell uses a very standard tower-type air cooler which comes with 10 copper heat pipes so it will be interesting to see if the CPU runs within its throttle limit. We have seen the CPU throttle and hit temperatures close to 100C even when running under high-end AIO liquid coolers.

The Dell Precision 3680 Tower PC is expected to launch next month and pricing will depend on the configuration.

In addition to the high-end precision tower, Dell has also announced its Precision 3280 Compact Form Factor workstation PC which comes with Intel's 14th Gen 65W CPUs & is made to be the world's smallest workstation that supports Tensor Core GPUs. It supports GPUs of up to NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada with up to 64 GB of DDR5 memory and 8 TB of storage capacity. The CPU is also tuned to operate at a higher base TDP of 80W which should provide a boost in performance.

The Precision 3680 Tower PC will be available next month in both mountable and rackable options. There will be a six 3680 rack option which should provide great capabilities for data center users.