Desktops aren’t very exciting these days, so we don’t usually write about them when we get (or build) new ones. Still, we do keep refreshing our inventory to remain current with new hardware trends, and our lab inventory is capable of supporting pretty extensive hardware compatibility testing projects, albeit generally consumer-focused ones.
Since December, we’ve added the following new desktop systems to our QA labs:
A Dell Alienware Area 51-R5 – Intel Core i9-7900X CPU, 16GB physical RAM, and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080ti GPU.
We don’t usually purchase many Alienware systems, and the build quality has definitely improved since our last one. This system should see extensive use for compatibility and game testing projects, as well as supporting our load testing and performance testing services.
A Cyberpower Gamer Master 2202 – AMD Ryzen-5 2400G, 8GB physical RAM, and an onboard Vega 11 GPU.
A low-end gaming system, this one also gives us access to current-generation embedded AMD video, and can always have a PCIE video card added to better emulate a real-world budget gaming system (no one really runs embedded video except as a backup).
A Dell Vostro 3670 – Intel Core i3-8100 CPU, 20GB physical RAM, and embedded Intel UHD 630 video.
We’ve recently seen an uptick of interest in business workstations and have started adding a few systems to accommodate this trend. This is a pretty entry-level business system, although it also gives us access to Intel Optane memory – in this case, 16GB of solid-state storage being used as RAM, in addition to 4GB of conventional memory.
A lab-built system – Intel Core i5-9600K CPU, 16GB physical RAM, and embedded Intel UHD 630 graphics.
We ended up building with the unlocked CPU due to availability – we rarely overclock our lab systems, since it introduces additional variables to the performance-related testing that we do using these systems. While we left the system running with Intel video, in practice it will almost always be tested using one of our loose lab video cards, and has a power supply to support this.
An Apple iMac – Intel Core i5-7500, 8GB physical RAM, and an AMD Radeon Pro GPU.
A bit of inventory backfill; our Macs are usually used for testing desktop applications and websites rather than hardware compatibility, so our inventory generally falls modestly behind the current-generation hardware.
An Apple MacBook Pro – Intel Core i5-7360U, 8GB physical RAM, and embedded Intel Iris Plus 640 video.
This system rounds out our Mac laptop inventory a bit, and is pretty representative of an ‘off-the-rack’ consumer system.
That’s it for now. As always, we continue to expand our lab inventory of systems suitable to both functionality and compatibility testing; please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about our lab hardware capabilities, or would like to discuss involving our software QA services in one of your projects.
Written by Beta Breakers
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