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Often tied up with higher-end towers of power, it’s time we gave the midrange a turn. In this case, it’s a Dell Precision 5860 Tower desktop workstation. Starting at $2,049 (about $9,100 in the much-upconfigured version tested), Dell’s middle-road workstation is another unassuming (but large) black full-tower chassis with handles. You’ll find one of several Intel Xeon-based processors with vPro, AMD, or Nvidia professional graphics cards, up to a whopping 2TB of RAM, and as much as 72TB of solid-state storage. While this Dell tower starts on the inexpensive side for workstations and does well for itself in the midrange, its individual price doesn’t remain competitive as it scales up to support more intense professional needs.Design: A Simple Full-Tower That Can Lay Flat Like a ServerAs we know, workstations aren’t meant to bring attention to themselves like gaming desktops, and the design of the full-tower Precision is the same. It’s an all-black chassis with venting in the front. On the front is the familiar Dell symbol in the middle, with the model information displayed above the two 5.25-inch bays. These workstation-class chassis can get heavy as you scale up, but thankfully, you’ll find built-in handles to help with the heavy lifting.
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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The front of the chassis has unique diagonal lines and an offset hexagonal pattern for air intake. You can also lay it down on its side, as you’ll find rubber pads designed for the job (as well as on the bottom). The front panel I/O is on the right and runs vertically. You get two USB Type-C ports (each 10Gbps, one with power share) and two Type-A ports (5Gbps). Above that are two 5.25-inch bays for expansion and a slim (about 9.5mm) slot for optical drives. Overall dimensions are similar to other tower workstations, with the 5860 measuring 16.4 by 6.8 by 17.8 inches and weighing up to 47 pounds when fully configured.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Accessing the internals on the Precision 5860 is as easy as pushing the locking latch and pulling to release the panel to expose the carefully crafted internals. Several shrouds greet you to route air through the system once inside. Swappable parts have light blue contact points to remove or install additional storage and other accessories easily. Our system came equipped with several fans that remained quiet throughout most tests. Once our processor and graphics cards ran the stress tests, they became audible, but they weren’t noisy, and the tone wasn’t off-putting.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Configurations: Up to Two Video Cards, 24-Core Intel Xeon PowerCustom configurations and loadouts are the rules for workstations, not the exception. While the entry-level models are appealing, individual power users or IT managers buying a fleet of systems for a business need to choose wisely for their intended workloads.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The Precision 5860’s base configuration starts at $2,049, less than some previous tower workstations we’ve covered. As usual, volume and other discounts exist, so the prices listed here will always be more of a ballpark figure. As configured, you’re pushing $9,100, with the CPU and GPU options responsible for much of that cost. If you need more horsepower than this, you’ll have to step up to the 7960 series with the 56-core Xeon and Ada RTX 6000.Dell’s Precision 5860 models support Intel Xeon processors with up to 24 cores. The base configuration comes with a six-core Intel Xeon W3-2423, 16GB (in a 1×16 config) of DDR5-4800 ECC RAM, and either an AMD Radeon Pro W6300 graphics or an Nvidia T400 (the least expensive graphics options), a 256GB PCIe NVMe M.2 drive, a 750-watt power supply, and a 1GbE port on the rear. The best CPU is the 24-core Xeon W7-2495 we have installed, adding over $2,000 to the cost. RAM support is listed as a maximum of 2TB, which would add a shocking $100,000 to the bill and defeat the purpose of this class of machine.For storage, the Precision 5860 supports up to 56TB on the board between SATA (4x 12TB) and NVMe (2x 4TB). If that’s a ceiling for your workflows, you can add another 16TB with the optional UltraSpeed PCIe Add-In-Card. For those who didn’t keep track, that’s 72TB altogether—impressive.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
You’ll find plenty of graphics card options as well. While you won’t find any “non-professional”-grade cards, Dell sells a wide range of professional graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia. AMD has six options ranging from the Radeon Pro W6300 2GB to the W7900 48GB. You’ll then find 12 different Nvidia options, from the T400 4GB to the monster A6000 48GB, and even a combo A800+T1000 as a flagship configuration. In short, plenty of choices are on offer along with certified drivers that ensure 100% accuracy and prioritize rendering quality over speed. This is useful for applications like AutoCAD, Solidworks, and Adobe products for which the system is designed.Some of these components can use quite a bit of power under load, but Dell has you taken care of with two options: a 750W or 1,350W power supply. The configuration page automatically selects the right one, depending on your selected options. For example, if you choose a processor that’s more than 165W (Xeon W5-2445) and up, the system automatically upgrades the PSU—the same with video cards. When a power-hungry option gets selected, Dell’s website will suggest a higher output.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Our test unit is one of the higher configurations possible on the Precision 5860. Our sample sports the fastest processor for the SKU and a high-end professional graphics card. The $9,000-plus configuration may sound pricey, but it’s a workstation, and with reliability and stability critical, and time is money, it can certainly be worth it. Remember, this workstation is ISV (Independent Software Vendor) certified, so it’s tested to ensure “…the high-performance applications you rely on every day run smoothly.” It’s also ready to create VR content, and with all the horsepower available, it is an AI-ready workstation. There’s not much the Precision 5860 can’t do when fully decked out of the box, especially when scaled up. Let’s not forget you have Dell’s support team standing behind you in case of issues.Testing the Dell Precision 5860: Competitive in Performance (But Not in Price)The Precision 5860 we have for testing is one of the more performant specs for this SKU. While its performance didn’t lead our charts, the configuration proved enough for our benchmarks, especially in video-card-heavy testing. Our testing compares it with the HP Z4 G5 ($6,691 as tested), HP Z8 Fury G5 ($11,867.40 as tested), and the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 ($16,905 as tested) and ThinkStation P5 (about $6,800 as tested).
Productivity and Content Creation TestsWe run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 renders a complex scene using the company’s Cinema 4D engine. At the same time, Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. We then use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems. It uses Adobe’s famous image editor, Creative Cloud version 22, to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks, from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The Precision 5860 performed well in this set of tests for the configuration. While other tested systems scored better, they also use better and more expensive hardware. Even the most comparable system, the HP Z4 G5, has a slightly better Xeon chip inside, which is surprising given its price until you notice its lower-end GPU.Graphics TestsWe test the graphics inside all laptops and desktops with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, ideal for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5 to further measure GPUs, which stresses low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests are rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics, and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation, respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
Equipped with Nvidia’s RTX A6000 48GB professional graphics card, we expected an impressive showing here and were not disappointed. Armed with the latest drivers and Windows, the 5860 beat the Thinkstation P5 with similar hardware and the HP Z4 G5 that gave it trouble in the productivity tests. (Except for, of course, the CPU-bound Night Raid test.)Workstation TestsUsing view sets from popular ISV applications, we measure workstation performance with SPECviewperf 2020, which renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wireframe models. We run the 1080p resolution tests based on PTC’s Creo CAD platform, Autodesk’s Maya modeling and simulation software for film, TV, and games, and Dassault Systemes’ SolidWorks 3D rendering package. Results are listed in frames per second (fps); higher numbers are better.Our other workstation test is Blender, an open-source 3D content creation suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We record the time it takes for Blender’s built-in Cycles path tracer to render two photorealistic scenes of BMW cars, one using the system’s CPU and one using the GPU. Lower times are better.
Our workstation tests continued to show off the 5860. Compared with machines using similar processors, the Dell tower was just as (if not more) capable of completing these benchmarks. Machines with more processing power, like the HP Z8 Fury G5 or the Lenovo ThinkStation P620, naturally defeated it in CPU-heavy tasks, but again, at a much higher cost. In short, you have nothing to worry about performance-wise on this workstation. Whatever hardware you choose, you’ll get its full potential within its category, though for a bit more cash than some competitors like HP.Verdict: Capable, Scalable, and QuietLike its big brother, the 7875 we covered, the Dell Precision 5860 provides many options to scale up the system. You can run up to two of the latest Ada-class Nvidia GPUs, two AMD professional cards, and mid-level Intel Xeon-class processors with vPro security. In short, the CPU and the video card have plenty of processing power. But if you need more, you must step up to Precision 7960 or the 7875.Dell’s configuration page, for the most part, is easy to understand and select the right parts. If it comes across a configuration conflict, the website lets you know. You can even equip the machine with 10GbE, RAID cards, optical drives, and many storage options. Workstations are not cheap, starting at just over $2,000 and scaling up multiple times higher. On top of the hardware, you get priority support contracts and a secure ecosystem with certified drivers and ISV built on a reliable and stable platform—a necessity to keep the workflows flowing. Dell’s quiet operation and lower starting point make it an attractive product for professionals looking into more powerful workstation-class systems. However, being better priced for similar hardware, the HP Z4 G5 holds onto its Editors’ Choice title for midrange workstations.
Dell Precision 5860 Tower
Pros
Quiet operation under most loads
Up to 72TB storage (w/ add-in-card)
Tool-less chassis lays horizontally, too
ISV-certified
View
More
The Bottom Line
With the Precision 5860, Dell has crafted another quiet-running, scalable, and ISV-certified workstation with tool-free access for professional graphics work.
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