BOXX Releases Its Smallest-ever Workstation, The Liquid-cooled APEXX 1

There’s some big news out of BOXX today involving a small product that’s sure to intrigue creative professionals who demand the highest performance in the smallest form-factor. That’s a goal that the APEXX 1 delivers in spades; its chassis is a mere 4.7″ wide, 8.5″ tall, and 8.0″ long, yet it supports an overclocked eight-core CPU or referenced-clocked CPU with up to 18 cores. It doesn’t look too bad, either.

As with all of BOXX’s workstations, the APEXX 1’s chassis was designed in-house and manufactured in the US. I’ve always found the former point interesting, as BOXX designs PCs for the most robust design software out there, and actually uses it to craft its own hardware. In this particular case (no pun, of course), it’s Dassault Systèmes’ SolidWorks fueling that process.

Also like other APEXX’s, this one is liquid cooled with a custom design. At the center of the rig is a blower fan that pulls cool air in from the front and exhausts the warm air out the back. The shot below helps highlight this well, and also clues us in on some of BOXX’s other design decisions. At the top of the chassis is the workstation graphics card, and at the bottom, a very modified PSU design. Storage by way of SATA or M.2 SSDs is found on the opposite side, behind the motherboard.

BOXX offers two default configurations of its APEXX 1, each one catering to a slightly different type of user. One utilizes the enthusiast eight-core processor from Intel, Core i7-5960X, overclocked to a definitively stable 4GHz. This configuration would be best used by those who will do more creating than rendering, although it’d be no slouch for the latter.

But for those who require huge processing power, and not to mention the added assurance ECC memory provides, the other model can be configured with Xeon CPUs, including impressive 18-core brutes. It’s a good thing BOXX designed its own chassis for the APEXX 1, because I’d have to imagine with that kind of horsepower, performance would bleed right through the sides.

If there’s a single downside to the APEXX 1 I can find, it’s one BOXX can’t fix: the best performing graphics card offered is NVIDIA’s Quadro K1200. While that card is more than suitable for content creation and manipulation, some might desire the much-improved performance a card like the Quadro M4000 would provide. Alas, that card is 1.5-inches longer than the APEXX 1, so it’s an obvious no-go. It will be exciting when NVIDIA fleshes out the rest of its current-gen lineup with Maxwell-based parts.

You can learn more about the APEXX 1 at the official product page, where you can also learn about BOXX’s “Overclocked Advantage” and the company’s forthcoming renderPRO 1, which will be able to stack with the APEXX 1.