14 DAY TRIAL // Boxx Technologies managed to build one of the most powerful workstations available in the mini-ITX format. Called Apexx 1, it can integrate an Intel Xeon CPU that holds 18 cores or a factory overclocked Core i7 that can hold up to eight cores. Coming with a special cooling solution, it offers great performance with lots of horsepower.
That amount of performance isn't something usually found in mini-ITX form factors, and when you think that this thing holds a specially-designed cooler to be able to cool down a fiercely powerful Xeon E5 v3 on a modified LGA2011-3 socket in a small case environment, it really makes me think how far technology has advanced in packing enormous power in a computer the size of a shoe box.
The Apexx 1 system comes with up to 64GB of ECC memory, one high-end solid-state drive in M.2 form-factor (with PCIe 3.0 x4 interface), two 2.5” HDDs or SSDs. Unfortunately, you can't have everything, even on this incredible, little PC, so although you'll enjoy the amazing power of a Xeon 18-core beast, you'll have to contend with small-factor professional cards from AMD and NVIDIA.
Boxx' fastest graphics adapter is NVIDIA's Quadro K1200 with 4GB of memory, which isn't bad, especially for professional use. Ports-wise, the Apexx 1 configurations include USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and Wi-Fi 802.11ac wireless connectivity.
The most powerful mini-ITX out there with questionable graphics adapter options
As you can imagine, the ASRock X99E-ITX/ac mainboard only supports DDR4 modules, and although this is not a Skylake system, it offers very comparable performance with the new memory standard as well. Unfortunately, the X99 DDR4 will not support quad-channel controllers found in advanced processors, so multi-core performance will be limited in applications that require a lot of memory bandwidth.
This little device is very powerful indeed, and since it's built for video and image rendering, it's built to work great with Autodesk 3ds Max, Autocad, Maya, Revit, Cinema4D and others. Unfortunately, if you expect it to run great in graphics and rendering 3D applications, there are some other workstations out there that provide much better graphical solutions.
The cheapest Boxx Apexx 1 comes at $5180 (€4642) while the most expensive will be around $15600 (€13986) while being packed with Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3 with 45MB cache, 64GB of DDR4 memory, 512GB M.2 SSD, two 1.2TB Serial ATA-6Gb/s SSDs and so on.
