The new Photon transportable workstation from Renderboxes will provide some serious grunt for those who need more than simple laptop graphics power.
Laptops are part of our everyday lives, but they have quite understandable limitations. These can be summed up as short battery life, fan noise, and an inability to work with the latest and greatest Nvidia GPUs.
UK-based Renderboxes—and the clue’s in the name—focuses on exactly the areas where laptops run out of steam: graphics processing power, or “GPU compute,” to use the current lingo. The company has a range of workstations with as many as eight Nvidia GPUs, including the upcoming RTX5090 and all the current Nvidia Ada-powered models.
Even a single latest-generation GPU packs a powerful punch when paired with an AMD Ryzen 9 990X 16-core processor, and that’s exactly the package that Renderboxes has fitted into the just-launched Photon, a transportable workstation for media professionals who need to take their work with them.
Photon also comes with up to 96 GB of fast DDR5 memory and dual NVMe storage. With all that under the lid, you might think it would sound like a jet engine and get rather hot, but it doesn’t. Heat management is one of the factors that define high-end workstation performance, and Renderboxes has designed Photon to run cool and quiet. In fact, it can run uninterrupted 24/7 for days or weeks.
Some media workstations achieve their speed through techniques like overclocking, but Renderboxes avoids this because it can lead to unreliability as critical components literally cook themselves. Richard Rogers, who founded Renderboxes, told us that the company’s workstations are so fast that there’s no need to overclock.
Like all Renderboxes’ products, Photon is custom-designed. Instead of an off-the-shelf case and interior structure, every part is built from scratch to maximise performance, with more-than-ample power supplies and clever ventilation built into the cases.
Photon is aimed at DIT, editing, colour grading, compositing and 3D artists. It’s also ideal for real-time virtual production and 3D artists.
Photon has also been thoroughly tested and approved for use with iodyne Pro Data, an 8-port Thunderbolt storage device with up to 48TB of NVMe memory protected by RAID level 6 and always-on encryption. A single Pro Data unit can connect multiple Photon workstations for an incredibly fast and secure post-production workgroup.
Renderboxes Photon is available now, starting at £4,095, excluding VAT. More info at renderboxes.com