ProMax One+, the new workstation

Since Apple announced the discontinuation of its Mac Pro towers in Europe, the opportunities for PCs in the market are increasing day by day. These have increased even more because, despite Apple’s insistence that during 2013 there will be some important news for its workstation line, during NAB they refused to make any kind of statement about it.

Manufacturers are making Windows towers increasingly sophisticated, attractive and, above all, powerful. One of the companies taking advantage is ProMax, which has just released an update to its One workstation with the new One+, which was a big hit at NAB 2013.

One+ is intended for those users who need a high performance CPU, with large internal storage capacities and who are going to perform DIT (if you are interested in learning more about this there will be a DIT Course soon), color correction, finishing, VFX or supercomputing tasks.

It is marketed in three types of configurations:

• Hero: is the top of the range and has a 16-core Intel Xeon E5-2687 CPU, running at 3.1 GHz and with 40 MB cache. It is the right one if we want the fastest delivery, encoding and processing.

• Edit: With a 12-core, 2.5 GHz Xeon E5-2640 CPU, it is ideal for workflows that require powerful yet affordable expansion and processing.

• On Set: back to 16 cores, with a 2.4 GHz Xeon E5-2665 CPU. It is suitable for workflows requiring fast access to native high-resolution files such as ARRI Raw or R3D 5K material.

Regardless of the chip chosen, ProMax ensures excellent performance for working with applications such as DaVinci Resolve, Scratch, Symphony, Maya and more.

Each of these configurations has 16 RAM slots, and can go up to 128 GB. One+ is built with eight PCI slots, including four of them PCIe 3.0 with 16 lanes (compared to six slots in the original One).

There is also an LTO option (with an integrated LTO-5 or LTO-6 unit) for backup or long-term storage operations.

It contains an integrated RAID system (eight-bay) that supports up to 24 TB of internal storage. In addition, up to four different bootable SSDs are supported, allowing you to maintain system backups or simply boot into different application environments. For example, you can keep an Adobe editing environment on one disk and an Avid environment on another, booting the corresponding disk for each project.

Another common application of One is with raw and uncompressed workflows with the DaVinci Resolve color correction system (about which there are already new calls for the DaVinci Resolve Course and Advanced Course). However, the users’ request to make One portable could not be fulfilled. One+ weighs 65 pounds in its base configuration (almost 30kg).

If CPU performance is not sufficient, NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards can be added for GPU acceleration.

As for connections, USB 2.0 and 3.0, Firewire 400 and eSata are available on the front panel. A card reader with multiple slots such as SxS, P2 or CF can also be integrated.

One+ runs on Windows 7 operating system. Here are its specifications.