Workstations and Desktops

This right here is my workstation. And workstation actually has two different meanings. Workstation is just the station in which you work at, and so this is the location that I do a lot of my work in, and so this would be considered a workstation from that standpoint. It's also a workstation because I have a computer here, a workstation computer. This workstation computer allows me to carry out the functions of my job. And so that's what a workstation is.

What a workstation is

As with many of these definitions, workstation also has a few different meanings out there, and you'll see people define what a workstation is a little differently. But what we're going to say is it's the location with the compute power to carry out your work. So in my example, this is my workstation here where I'm working at, and so I've got this workstation here.

Some examples of this would be a Dell Precision, or a Lenovo P series, or a Z by HP. And really the purpose of this is just to do work — I mean, that's in the name, right? Workstation. Not everybody defines it quite that way, but that's how we're going to define it here, and how many define this.

So some examples of workstations: it'd be running off of things like a Windows, Linux, Mac OS, some sort of operating system to run this. And then we would be running work-related apps. And whatever workstation we have has the power to run specific apps. So if I'm doing 3D architecting, then I'm going to need more processing power. If I'm doing video editing, I'm going to need to have a lot of memory involved with that. However, if I'm just doing some research online, it doesn't take a whole lot of compute power to actually do that.

So some benefits of that is that they are specialized for whatever task that we're trying to do, and there's a lot of expandability usually with it. It can get expensive depending on what you're doing. And then some of the drawbacks is it's just not portable — although I have seen people taking their machines from one location to another, but it's not always portable. And they're more expensive if you're going with the higher-end ones.

Workstation versus desktop

Now, some people will use the word workstation and desktop interchangeably, and that's fine. They're close enough in their definitions that I don't think it's going to matter in most situations. However, there are a little bit of differences with this.

So for instance, we could have a desktop machine, a machine that's sitting on my desktop, that really is not a workstation. Let's say I created this gaming machine and I'm doing this gaming on it — then we could technically say, well, that's not necessarily a workstation. Or if I'm browsing the internet just for fun, that's not necessarily a workstation. So the lines get a little blurred there.

Same thing, I could be supplying laptops to my end users, in which case it's not a desktop, but I would consider those workstations, because even though they're taking them home with them, they also have a spot at work where they're setting up and that's where they're doing all their work at. So the lines get a little blurry here, but there's a lot of overlap between these two terms.

What a desktop is

So what is a desktop then? Well, a desktop is a computer small enough to fit on a desk, but it's large enough it's not really considered portable — although I've seen my kids hauling their desktops out the door so that they can go gaming at somebody's house. But generally speaking, it's not really considered to be portable.

So some examples of this would be like the Dell Optiplex, the Alienware Aurora, hz2 Tower. And really the uses for a desktop is really all over the place, whatever you want compute power for. From an apps standpoint, lots of apps available to install on it; it just needs to be compatible with the operating system, so lots of availability from there. So lots of flexibility and expandability, so not just from the app perspective where we can install lots of apps, but also from a hardware perspective: there's a lot of different combinations of different equipment that we can use on it. And since there's lots of ways that we could put this together and install things, the cost tends to be a little bit less, because there's lots of vendors that can fit in and play well together from that perspective. The problem with this, the drawbacks of a desktop, is it's not as portable.

Inside a desktop

Here's an example of a desktop. Now, desktops come in all different shapes and sizes. This particular one is a little more deep than a lot of them and also less width to it, and that's because instead of the power supply sitting next to the motherboard, this power supply is sitting underneath. So we can actually see the power supply from this angle.

But what can we see? Well, number one, we see lots of fans in here — that's to keep it cool. And this big fan is front and center, and that's because it's sitting on top of the CPU that does all the processing, so this is taking that heat away from that CPU and cooling it down. Over here we see the graphics card. We see some RAM. Of course, the motherboard underneath. And then we have quite a few cables that are interconnecting all of these different devices.