← Reshaping Workflows with Dell Pro Precision and NVIDIA RTX PRO GPUs
Reshaping Workflows with Dell Pro Precision and NVIDIA RTX PRO GPUs
Beyond Entry: Dell Tower T2's Game-Changing Upgrades
00:28:57
Dell’s Matt Garcia joins to unveil the Pro Max Tower T2—a high-performance, AI-ready workstation, and why it’s the new standard for creatives and pros.
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- [00:00]
Logan
Foreign.
- [00:05]
Matt Garcia
Welcome to Reshaping Workflows with Dell Pro Precision and Nvidia, where innovation meets real world impact in high performance computing.
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Logan
Welcome back to another exciting episode of Reshaping Workflows with Dell Pro Max and and Nvidia RTX GPUs. And guess what we're doing in this episode. We're actually talking about a Dell Pro Max and not just an ISV or a partner or AI. So very excited. I just got as the time of this recording I just got my T2 have not been set up. I've been traveling a lot or whatever. I could think of no one better to come in and talk about, you know, the Dell Pro Max T2 desktop we just launched as a time of this recording, you know, a couple of months ago, like a month and a half ago. Think of anyone better to come in and talk about it than Matt Garcia, who is not on my team, on my extended team for product management. So Matt, tell everyone kind of who you are, what you do at Dell. And a little bit about you are a fun fact. I can tell you like to surf because of the wooden. The wooden. Aren't you in North Carolina?
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Matt Garcia
South Carolina?
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Logan
South Carolina.
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Matt Garcia
Paddle board actually.
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Logan
Oh, paddle board.
- [01:18]
Matt Garcia
Haven't picked up surfing yet, but I
- [01:20]
Logan
have a good surfing story. But introduction. Let's go.
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Matt Garcia
Hey, I'm Matt Garcia. I am a product manager on the Promax team here at Dell. I'm managing a variety of fixed workstation products, the T2 which we're going to be talking about today. And then I've also got a couple other next gen products which are going to be launching in 2026. I've been at Dell a little over five years, mostly hopping around product manager roles, but also did a little bit of biz ops work. And yeah, I'm excited to be here today. Thanks for having me.
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Logan
Of course man. Of course. So let's kind of start from the top on the T2. So for those that didn't know, I'll kind of recap, you know, episode one that I had with our boss Charlie Walker, who's the GM for delpromax, you know, in. Well I guess it was kind of marches CES timeframe like January to March. Ish. But we've been ongoing is we went through kind of a rebrand, right. We went from, you know, xps Precision, all these disparate brands into Dell, Dell Pro, Delpro Max, Dell Home School, Dell Pro traditional IT managed device. Much like you know, if you're in a corporate environment or a knowledge worker Etc, you know, you're writing a bunch of emails, you know, on a network, security, things like that. And then delpromax kind of X workstation, right? Heavy cpu, gpu, compute, lots of storage, very focused on industry workloads. So previously, which I don't know if that product is sunsetted or not yet, but previous system before T2 was the Precision 3680. And now we have the Delpro Max Tower T2. Let's start with Matt. Some of the differences maybe in size, performance, wattage, you know, Differences between the 3680 and the T2, T2 tower.
- [03:02]
Matt Garcia
Precision 3680, just at a basic level, these are fixed tower workstations, right? They're going to be standalone units, sit on a desk somewhere. The T2 tower is 32 liters in size. If you're like me, don't really use liters. 32 liters is around 8 gallons, right? So a little over a foot tall, a little over half a foot wide and about a foot and a half in depth. Very capable of sitting on a desk. But if you're in a space constrained environment, it might be too big. So just to give you kind of high level of what we're talking about here. And then the next thing is that the T2 tower and the Precision 3680 are going to be what we in the industry call entry class workstations. Or you know, at Dell, what you were just talking about with the new branding that we have, we've got the base tier, the plus tier and the premium tier. These are going to sit in the base tier. So you hear entry class, you hear base tier. And I know where your mind goes, right? It's, you think simpler or maybe smaller, just lesser in some way. And that's, that's not quite right for fixed workstations and it's, it's a bit misleading. So two main points to this entry. Fixed workstations can still be incredibly capable in terms of terms of performance. So the T2 for example, it's actually going to have the highest single core performance in the entire Pro Max lineup. It's going to really excel at certain types of workloads, ones that are more interactive in nature and we can get more into that later, but very capable in terms of performance. Our larger towers by contrast I guess are like the Precision 5000, 7000 towers. Those are going to have bigger CPUs with more core counts. Those are also going to be great at performance, a different type of performance. So the first thing here with entry workstations is that they can still be incredible, incredible machines and do a lot. Second thing here, entry fixed workstation, that category is so broad, it comprises 80% of the workstations worldwide. Fixed workstations worldwide. So T2 tower precision 3680, those, those towers that are around 30 liters in size are going to make up around 2/3 of that 80%. So effectively what we're saying is that 1 out of every 2 fixed workstations in the world is going to be hopefully a T2 tower, but if not something very equivalent to it. So these are hugely pervasive, they're used in dozens of industries and I think as we get into some of the key features here, in a minute it'll become clear why that is the case.
- [05:49]
Logan
Okay, I love that. So, and I, and I want to pull on a thread a little bit and I totally agree. I mean I've got access, I mean I do work at Dell, right. So I have access to kind of, you know, based here up to kind of the max, right, that we, we totally offer. And I've used both. And I am not, you know, an engineer running virtual simulations or anything like that. I don't need a 7960 or its predecessor. I don't need 1700 hard drives in this thing. Like I don't necessarily need four GPUs, but the performance that I got out of my 3680 and now will ultimately be my T2 is pretty shocking. And like, not to use brands, but the way I'd like to describe it, and I think you probably agree Matt, is that if you look at a BMW, right, you have kind of your 3, 57 series, a 3 series BMW doesn't suck. Like it just, it doesn't suck. It just doesn't have quite the extra accompaniments and features that like the seven has now. You know, not that it's bad, it still goes fast, it looks sleek, it runs well, it's got a great engine, it's designed well, it's engineered well, but it's just, it's just a little different. But let's talk about kind of some of the performance stuff. So the first thing is you talked about kind of CPU performance for a workstation class tower of that size. Highest single threaded performance. Let's one talk about kind of what is, what does that mean? And then we know we have dual threaded performance like parallel compute kind of in GPUs. But what is singular, you know, singular core performance. I'm saying it wrong. I know I am. But what's the difference in what applications is using that versus that? You might want to think about moving up into kind of a dual threaded performance cpu.
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Matt Garcia
So single threaded performance is really, I like to think of it as more of interactive workloads and I think I said that term earlier and that it's exactly what it sounds like. Right. You're the user's interacting with whatever they're doing on the screen. This could be things like you know three 2D, three D graphics, maybe imaging image or video editing work of, of all kinds, working with some really heavy data sets potentially maybe some light rendering work, things like that. You know it's also going to be a lot of like the day to day work that, that people like you or I collaborators do where you're, you're doing something like this, A you know, a meeting virtually that's also going to run really mostly rely on single threaded single core performance.
- [08:09]
Logan
Yeah, that makes sense. So when you say like I, I liken it to kind of an ISV thing where if you're using like you know you're doing VFS work like whether you're using Blender or Adobe, you're kind of constantly interacting with that versus so it's an interaction ongoing and then the, the converse is more of a hey, I run it and it is running. So the analogy I would use is what's faster? A single lane highway. Probably a single lane highway with no one on your maneuvering. But if you've got to go, you want to do two lanes. If you're running like kind of a long term, I mean I guess would be the analogy I would use.
- [08:43]
Matt Garcia
I think that's perfectly appropriate. And when you need that multi lane stuff, that's your multi threaded, your multi core performance that the big towers are really going to excel at.
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Logan
That makes total sense. Let's talk about the GPU a little bit. So you know in the 3680 you have the Nvidia RTX 6080 which is 48 gigs. But what I love about the T2 is and this is something if you follow Nvidia, you've noticed most people I would think in the market probably aren't super educated on this is that there are two actually Nvidia RTX, you know, Pro 6000 GPUs, they both have 96 gigs, you know, memory. The difference is one is a 300 watt card which is you know what ADA basically was and that's called the Max Q. Interesting branding. But we'll leave it at that. And then we have the workstation edition, which is 600 watts. And the T2 actually comes with the 600 watt, where some of our, you know, legacy precision systems are not. So can you talk a little bit about that?
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Matt Garcia
This is probably the most exciting thing about the T2, right, is the latest gen Nvidia RTX Blackwell Pro Professional cards, including that 600 watt, 6000 class card. You know, this is really going to open up a new world in terms of GPU acceleration. Previously, if you wanted to get that much, you know, power out of your graphics, you're putting in multiple cards, right? And multiple cards means a bigger machine. With this new card that you can fit in our T2 tower, you know, you're talking the lowest entry price to get an enormous GPU acceleration capability, right? You know, not only that, you can also do multiple of the smaller cards in the T2. So you could do two of the 2000 class cards, for example.
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Logan
And I think that is from a. And you said, you know, 50% of the market could potentially be, or, you know, kind of our volume could be this. It is kind of amazing from a GPU compute standpoint of what can now be done. Right? Like, I mean, not to get all techie here, but you know, when you're running like an AI workload, a lot of times you can't run those and the cards don't have NV link, right? So you can't really connect like an old ADA Class 6000, you know, 48 gigs. It just, you're limited by the 48 gigs, but by doubling that VRAM, I mean, there are models that you could never, from an AI perspective, could never run on a workstation. I mean, you're entering, you know, a server class, you know, H100 with the amount of GPU compute, and that's literally setting in. Maybe not everyone can lift, but in a, a tower that most people, I think adults could pick up and put on the desk fairly easily, it's not like a complete huge tower. It's not a beast, right? So it packs, you know, quite a while up in terms of overall performance.
- [11:32]
Matt Garcia
Totally. That migration from server to an actual or data center to an actual workstation is only possible because of these Nvidia cards. And, you know, there's all kinds of benefits associated with that, with the reduced costs, reduced latency, higher, you know, security possibilities. It'll be really interesting to see how that evolves as a whole over the coming years as these, you know, the capabilities of these in Workstation cards kind of continues to progress.
- [12:01]
Logan
Is there anything before we kind of talked about some of the big kind of performances, differences between multi, threaded, single threaded performance. We talked about gpu. Is there anything else? You know, is the guy who manages the product that really stands out to you? You know, any feature benefit within the T2? Before we start talking a little bit about, you know, the targeted industries and the Personas for the T2, let me
- [12:24]
Matt Garcia
go back to performance for a minute because I didn't mention this. T2 is going to have the latest 15th gen Intel Core Ultra Series 2, codename Aero Lake CPUs. We're going to have two tiers of it, right? 65 watt or 125 watt base power. And with CPUs, right, as you increase the power, you drive more performance. So one of the things you can do with those CPUs is increase the power beyond that base power level, above that 65 watt or 125 watt. And that's going to increase performance. The consequence of that is that you're going to generate more heat and you've got to dissipate that heat. So that means more fans and you're going to have more noise. And after a period of time, if that heat becomes too high, you have to scale that power delivery back down. But if you can manage to dissipate that heat effectively enough, you can actually sustain those high power levels indefinitely. And that's what we're doing on T2. So for the 65 watt CPUs, we're going to run them at 85 watts and 125 watts. We're running them all the way up at 250 watts. So this is going to result in massive extra performance that you wouldn't normally get. And one of the really cool things about, since we're doing it at both tiers of the cpu, our customers are going to get those performance improvements at all the varying cost points. You don't necessarily need to buy like the top end CPU to get that extra performance. You're going to get it anywhere in the stack, dude.
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Logan
Okay, so, and I hate the word overclocking, but basically in a sense people that build their own PCs, those type of, they talk about, hey, we're going to run this higher, like so it's still, I want to make sure, but this is still within spec. So even though we're doing this, it is not like, hey, we just voided your warranty. Like all of this is above board, above spec. Like we're not like putting some Frankenstein thing together that you can't get your service plan on, right?
- [14:24]
Matt Garcia
Yeah, yeah, not at all. And our engineering teams deserve the kudos here for, for kind of building out this ability to sustain those higher power levels, higher temps and dissipate that heat effectively. So yeah, perfect, perfectly normal and something that we are really proud of.
- [14:41]
Logan
That's really cool. So I mean in using kind of the higher end of the stack, running them at I think you said 125 watts, now you can do 250, like have, I mean if you can share, great. If you can't. But like what is that performance? Kind of a one to one performance. Is there any, you know, as you reach that higher temperature, do you lose a little bit of the juice on that or does it truly just a. We're, you know, we're running it to 50 normally run at 125, like that's the increased performance that we're getting.
- [15:09]
Matt Garcia
Yeah, it's, it's. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it's not, it's not a 2 to 1, you know, 100% increase. Like you, you don't just double the performance when you double the wattage. All these CPUs have basically efficiency curves where as you increase power you, you also increase performance, but it starts to level off the higher you go. Typically, you know, it's not a one to one extra watt you give, you get one extra performance or whatever, but it is a big time gain over where you would be if you just stayed at that base power level.
- [15:40]
Logan
So I think that ties in really well with kind of the next question is that, you know, for this kind of, we're not going to use the word base, but we're using the word base like entry level tower, which is obviously from a performance standpoint not so entry. It's not your father level entry or my father's level entry. Right. We'll talk about industries in a second. But who actually. No, let's start with industries. What industries does kind of this product serve? And I know it could be, it can really range. But where are the kind of the sweet spots?
- [16:09]
Matt Garcia
I guess I would say the sweet spots are probably going to be like your graphics design, media and entertainment, maybe gis, mapping, finance, things like that. But you know, like we were saying earlier, one out of every two fixed workstations worldwide is going to be an equivalent tower to this. So really every industry is going to be using this. Really what's more important in the industry? And I think this is probably where you're going next. But it's really the, the user type and the target user that you have to keep in mind with who this box is really built for.
- [16:47]
Logan
Agree? Well, that was going to be my next question. So tell me kind of about you know, the, I mean we use the word Persona, Dell, but you know, the user type. Who, who is this really targeted at? Is this the kind of the doer? Is it the collaborator? Is it someone who's the specialist? Like where, where would you see kind of the user type across all industries, you know, this fitting in really well.
- [17:10]
Matt Garcia
Okay, so at Dell we talk about the, the three main promax or workstation user types as a collaborator, a creator or a specialist. And for the T2 tower or for the old Precision 3680, really those first two groups are going to be kind of your core target. That's not to say the specialist couldn't use this box. There are definitely some specialist roles where it's going to be a great solution, but really the collaborator and the creator. So for the collaborator that's you know, we're talking about like a business stakeholder, maybe a data analyst, maybe someone like me. Really like I, I'm going to have some workflows that really need high performance. It's not going to be the majority of the work I do, but every now and then I'm going to need it when I'm doing, you know, some kind of crazy power bi or you
- [18:03]
Logan
know, big time, you're looking at CAD files and stuff like that. Exactly. Product designs, you know, stuff like that.
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Matt Garcia
But I'm also doing a lot of like collaborating work or working with teammates, syncing with customers, something like that. But I am a big consumer of data. These, the collaborators also, they might use one of the smaller or mid sized GPUs, maybe the 2000 class or lower. Maybe they might not use one at all though. So that's not necessarily a must have.
- [18:32]
Logan
Right.
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Matt Garcia
And then the creators, that's going to be more of like your designers, your artists, your video producers, your engineers.
- [18:40]
Logan
Yep, yep.
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Matt Garcia
So they're going to be create, I mean creating like the name says, 2D, 3D graphics, maybe light rendering that, video editing work, things like that, CAD files there you probably are going to be using a gpu, maybe even one of the mid sized ones or even high power ones like that new 600 watt card. I think between. The creator is probably the real meat of the target for T2, but the collaborator category is definitely there as well.
- [19:12]
Logan
And I would agree with that. I mean I would absolutely agree with that. I mean it is kind of a perfect mix which allows you to kind of scale up and down, right, Depending on your workflow. Like for someone like you, you might need a little bit of a gpu, but you're really more focused on the extra performance from the CPU and the RAM and you know, storage of all the data running locally, all that kind of stuff. Right? Or for me is. I don't necessarily. I mean I love the, the overclocked and the, the 250 watt performance from 125 watt kind of scoped, you know, CPU. Because that just means everything runs faster on my computer. But where I focus that in the workflows with kind of AI having the 6000 kind of RTX Pro workstation edition where I can run any demo, I can run any environment, I can run any experiment that I want with pretty much any model that wasn't really. Other than ones that are specifically designed to run on servers. I can absolutely do it. And it's a hoss. And I can inference, I can train loras, I can. I mean I'm not training my own foundational models, but I can find two models. I mean I am. It's going to take a while, right? Because I don't have 10,000 gigs of vram. Right. I've got 96. But it's possible now where before it wasn't really possible. So I think it does a really good job of really spanning the entire kind of those three user types or archetypes. Definitely more on the collaborators, you know, creators. Absolutely. It, the specialist is kind of far and few between I think giving this to a data scientist of someone who is like, hey, I can't go spend $30,000 on a workstation or $40,000 on a workstation or I don't want to go spend that in the cloud. But they have Data science, freelance, whatever it might be. This is a great option because it gets you the GPU compute that you need without a completely insane price tag. And I think it's a good mix there for sure. We've kind of talked more kind of up and down kind of the stack. But I know that you, you know, go out and about quite a bit. I mean, I think you're going to me at Tech Summit next week. I mean, I'll be there too, which I don't know why they invite me. I just, I just go everywhere. 9 well, yeah, it is a trip and we get to talk to, you know, our, our me or friends and train Them up on, well, me specifically AI, but you, the entire tower portfolio with Alex. But you're out in the field more. You talk to customers. I mean, you're kind of training the trainers and training sales. That's kind of a core part of your, you know, responsibility. But from what you've heard about the feedback on the T2 so far, like, what have you heard? Like, positive are customers, like, oh my God, I can't believe we have this performance. Or hey, this is way better. Or what should we change? I mean, both positive and negative.
- [21:49]
Matt Garcia
I think from a positive standpoint, it's mostly an eagerness. And to give you an example of that, we, we are getting, you know, our doors beat down for the rest of the Blackwell cards to come. I get an email about that, you know, once, twice a week easily. And everyone already knows the answer, like they're coming as quickly as we can give them to you. But I think there's a real excitement to go out and get those cards. And you know, this machine is basically the entryway into that generation of cards. So that's definitely the good.
- [22:23]
Logan
The negatives, if there is none, we don't have to say them. I mean, other than I wish it was here back in August when it act or July when it actually launched. Other than that, that's not a negative. I mean that was just market demand.
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Matt Garcia
Yeah, uh, I don't know. I, I'm not coming. Nothing's coming to mind offhand, other than what you said. But if I think of something we can do.
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Logan
Oh yeah, let me know. And I know that you do some forward future stuff you don't do. I, I don't think you manage the, the micro or the, the other one do that. Does that fall in your patch as
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Matt Garcia
well or not the micro and the slim? No, not, not really. Although, you know, we kind of, we help each other out a lot on this team. So I'm, I'm more than capable of covering any of our products as long as you give me a heads up.
- [23:11]
Logan
And this is not enough of a heads up. Yeah, that's fair enough. Fair enough. Well, okay, tell me. I got a question for you, a personal question. So you came from the latitude side of the business. So think Delpro corporate laptop, managed IT device. And you've been on the team three months now. Four months.
- [23:31]
Matt Garcia
Yeah, maybe four.
- [23:32]
Logan
Yeah, four months now. How does the precision or how does the Dell Pro Max world vary from, you know, the Dell Pro world in terms of the devices or what you need to know? And I know I'VE never teed this question up, but I'm actually kind of curious and I think it's a good time to ask it.
- [23:49]
Matt Garcia
It's so different, right? Because I came from a notebook world to a desktop world. So from a product standpoint, first off, you're talking just a completely different ball game with a, with a notebook, you're limited. So limited, right? You're limited on space, you're limited on thermals, you're limited on power. You know, you just can't get so many things that you can get in a tower where you don't have space concerns. You can, you know, crank up the power to 250 watts. You can put in three hard drives, you can put in, you know, five or six SSDs, a terabyte of RAM. Like, the scale of what you can do with it is just completely different. And then, you know, just from a more. I'll call it a more personal level, although that's not quite the right term. I love, I've loved my time on the Pro Max team. I feel like there are. Because the products are so much more specialized. There are so many more experts in Dell.
- [24:53]
Logan
Mark Ryman. Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah.
- [24:57]
Matt Garcia
So there's so many people to learn from on all these different little corner niches that I never would have gotten to experience on the, on the notebook side, especially where, you know, I'm. You're covering a commercial notebook that's going to ship several million units a year. You're not concerned about those corner niches. You're. You're concentrated on the fat of the bat, right? And here it's just very different. So I've, I've learned more in these four months than, you know, I normally would have in a couple of years. So that's been great.
- [25:29]
Logan
That's cool. I'm glad to have you, man. You're a good dude, man. You're good egg. All right, so we've talked a lot about the T2. Let's do this because we're kind of getting up against time. Let's pretend, you know, someone is coming in just at this part of the episode. Give the 30 second, 1 minute elevator pitch on. Why T2 is the best entry level workstation choice that they have in the market.
- [25:55]
Matt Garcia
So three keys to the T2. You're going to get first, best in class performance. We've mentioned this a couple times, but this machine is really not a slouch. You know, high single core processing speeds that are going to excel at those interactive workloads. Two, you're going to get those cutting edge graphics capabilities, one big card, that 600 watt Nvidia Blackwell card or two of the smaller cards. Again, that's going to open up all these new GP acceleration workloads that were never possible in this kind of box before. And then three, and I don't think I touched on this. So I'm glad we're getting to T2. Tower is going to have a bunch of expandability and flexibility. We've slightly increased the chassis size. So it's really. We want the machine to be able to grow with you over the three, four, five plus years that you have it. So as your needs change, as you need more, you're going to be able to put that in. Because we've increased the size and we've added a bigger power supply. So it's going to be able to grow with you as a user.
- [26:59]
Logan
I love it. I mean, couldn't have said any better. It's like you manage the product, Matt. Like it's like you own the product. So with that we'll go ahead and call it. But before we do, I will obviously link to the T2 down in the description. But tell everyone if you're comfortable where they can find you on LinkedIn if they want to connect or ask any questions about the product.
- [27:19]
Matt Garcia
Yeah, for sure. My email is matt garciadel.com and then on LinkedIn just Matt Garcia. You can find me with the Dell label. I think I'm the only one.
- [27:29]
Logan
You're the only one, so you make it easy. Well Matt, really appreciate it. I love you coming to talk about the T2. I can't wait to crack into mine once I back from Europe for two days before I go somewhere else. But it was great. If you're not, check out the T2. Like Matt said, this class entry level class of workstation will be 50% of the workstation kind of fixed market. Check it out. T2 is a great option for you. You know whether that's the overclocking CPU performance, the GPU compute and something that really wasn't available in the 3680 is the expansion ability where you can put in multiple hard drives, you've got ability for different slots, you can actually grow the 3680. You couldn't put two GPUs in. Now this will allow you to put two GPUs. So there's a lot of allowing and I love how you said allows it to grow. So with that, think about the T2 when you're dreaming tonight. And this is Logan with reshaping workflows with Dell Pro Max and Nvidia RTX GPUs. Until the next one, keep dreaming about your next T2 too. This podcast was produced in partnership with Amaze Media Labs.