I have a Lenovo P620. It’s a bit noisy, but not intolerable. I haven’t had any hardware problems. Some people have reported problems after installing a Lenovo firmware update, so maybe don’t do that (I haven’t).
It may not be compatible with all graphics cards that you would think it would be—I found that a GTX 780 didn’t work for no identifiable reason. Possibly, they’ve disallowed all but “professional” GPUs. (An NVIDIA K40c did work, and it has the same “Kepler” architecture as the GTX 780.) I currently have one AMD WX2100 GPU (for actual display use) and three NVIDIA A4000 GPUs (for compute). I had had four A4000 GPUs, for which there are four suitable 16x PCIe 4 slots, but found that they wouldn’t all run at full speed due to cooling issues (this is a bit of a problem even with just three). This may say more about the A4000 than the P620, however. The 1000 Watt power supply of the P620 is useful if you want lots of GPU power.
The AMD Threadripper Pro processor is powerful, but single-thread performance is a little bit below the top Intel offerings. It has eight memory channels, so if you populate all eight DIMM slots with memory cards, you can get a lot of memory bandwidth. Note, however, that the NUMA memory hierarchy makes fine-grained communication amongst processor cores slower than on some Intel machines.
I bought the P620 to use for ML and other intensive computational tasks. It may be the most powerful affordable option for that. For general desktop use with a bit of gaming, there are probably better choices.
As is generally the case for all compute vendors, it will be a lot cheaper to buy a minimal system and then install memory, SSDs, HDDs, and GPUs from a third-party source, though that of course is more of a hassle and could produce compatibility problems.
I bought my system in February 2021 for $3400 Canadian dollars (plus tax). It had the 12-core Threadripper Pro 3945WX (the low-end option), and 32 GBytes of ECC RAM (two DIMMs), plus a NVIDIA P620 GPU (which I replaced with other GPUs), and a 1TB HDD. I added six more DIMMs (bought second-hand on ebay, for about $100 per DIMM, be careful to get the right kind!) to get 128 GBytes in eight channels, as well as additional SSDs and HDDs. The prices of everything may be different now. An A4000 GPU can now be obtained for about $1400 Canadian dollars, but mine were more expensive when I bought them before the crypto crash. An A4500 GPU has better cooling (and is a bit more powerful), but takes two slots and costs more.
I have a Lenovo P620. It’s a bit noisy, but not intolerable. I haven’t had any hardware problems. Some people have reported problems after installing a Lenovo firmware update, so maybe don’t do that (I haven’t).
It may not be compatible with all graphics cards that you would think it would be—I found that a GTX 780 didn’t work for no identifiable reason. Possibly, they’ve disallowed all but “professional” GPUs. (An NVIDIA K40c did work, and it has the same “Kepler” architecture as the GTX 780.) I currently have one AMD WX2100 GPU (for actual display use) and three NVIDIA A4000 GPUs (for compute). I had had four A4000 GPUs, for which there are four suitable 16x PCIe 4 slots, but found that they wouldn’t all run at full speed due to cooling issues (this is a bit of a problem even with just three). This may say more about the A4000 than the P620, however. The 1000 Watt power supply of the P620 is useful if you want lots of GPU power.
The AMD Threadripper Pro processor is powerful, but single-thread performance is a little bit below the top Intel offerings. It has eight memory channels, so if you populate all eight DIMM slots with memory cards, you can get a lot of memory bandwidth. Note, however, that the NUMA memory hierarchy makes fine-grained communication amongst processor cores slower than on some Intel machines.
I bought the P620 to use for ML and other intensive computational tasks. It may be the most powerful affordable option for that. For general desktop use with a bit of gaming, there are probably better choices.
As is generally the case for all compute vendors, it will be a lot cheaper to buy a minimal system and then install memory, SSDs, HDDs, and GPUs from a third-party source, though that of course is more of a hassle and could produce compatibility problems.
How much did that setup cost? I’m curious about similar use cases.
I bought my system in February 2021 for $3400 Canadian dollars (plus tax). It had the 12-core Threadripper Pro 3945WX (the low-end option), and 32 GBytes of ECC RAM (two DIMMs), plus a NVIDIA P620 GPU (which I replaced with other GPUs), and a 1TB HDD. I added six more DIMMs (bought second-hand on ebay, for about $100 per DIMM, be careful to get the right kind!) to get 128 GBytes in eight channels, as well as additional SSDs and HDDs. The prices of everything may be different now. An A4000 GPU can now be obtained for about $1400 Canadian dollars, but mine were more expensive when I bought them before the crypto crash. An A4500 GPU has better cooling (and is a bit more powerful), but takes two slots and costs more.