Defining the Workstation
The Precision 5820 is one of the elite members of Dell's workstation lineup. It's an entirely different machine than the Precision 3630 Tower, a smaller, lower-priced mid-tower that's based on one of Dell's OptiPlex business desktops.
he 5820 is a larger full-tower with much greater expansion capability and server-grade features that I'll get into shortly. It shares many design elements with the even more ferocious Precision 7820 and Precision 7920, both of which offer two processors. But if one CPU is enough for your workflow, look no further than the Precision 5820, which offers up to the 18-core, 36-thread Xeon W-2195 chip. The Xeon W-2145 in our test unit has only eight cores and 16 threads, but it has higher base (3.7GHz) and turbo (4.5GHz) clock speeds that should make it more responsive for everyday tasks than higher-core-count chips with lower operating speeds.