armari v25r-ra760g2
The Ryzen 7 CPU promises great things – does it deliver?
| | price £2,599 plus VAT company Armari Website armari.com
f or some years, AMD’S processors have been a pale shadow of Intel’s, with nothing worth considering for the workstation market since the glory days of Opteron. But that has all changed with the introduction of Ryzen 7, and our first glimpse of this capable new CPU is installed in Armari’s tiny V25 workstation chassis.
The Armari V25R-RA760G2 includes the current top Ryzen 7, the 1800X. This sports eight physical and 16 virtual cores, but costs about half as much as Intel’s eight-core equivalents. It also runs at 3.6GHZ, with a 4GHZ turbo mode. These are faster than Intel’s Broadwell-e eight- and ten-core options, although the latter have plenty of extra room for frequency improvement. Armari has partnered the 1800X with a healthy 32GB of 2,400MHZ DDR4 SDRAM.
The AMD resurgence doesn’t stop with the processor, either. Graphics comes in the form of the AMD Radeon Pro Duo. This is the new version of this card that doesn’t require custom water cooling and isn’t actually quite as powerful as the original one, but it has four times the memory and is now much less Watt-hungry.
Storage comes in the form of a 512GB M.2 NVME Pci-express solid state disk. The shipping version of this workstation will use the Samsung PM961, which is one of the fastest in its class, although this wasn’t available for our review. Although the V25R-RA760G2 uses Armari’s miniscule V25 chassis, there is room for up to three more 2.5-inch SATA drives, so storage can be added if required.
When it comes to performance, the Maxon Cinebench R15 CPU rendering test is the most impressive result. The score of 1,622 is around 60 per cent higher than a similarly-priced Intel processor, which would only be quad core. This score is only 29 per cent slower than Intel’s tencore Core i7, for less than half the price. Where thread-intensive tasks are concerned, this CPU makes enormous sense.
The Radeon Pro Duo isn’t quite so impressive compared to its Nvidia competitors as the Ryzen 7 is compared to Intel CPUS, however. The Maxon Cinebench Opengl score of 113.82 is good, but it’s still behind the likes of the Quadro P4000. Similarly, with Specviewperf 12.1, the 3dsmax-05 result of 96.76 is merely decent, with 106.94 in catia-04, 74.9 in maya-04, and 112.31 in sw-03. This is a capable system for modelling, but not outstanding.
Where the Radeon Pro Duo comes into its own is with a renderer that can harness dual GPUS via Opencl. The overall system score in Luxmark 3.1 is 6,842 – the fastest we’ve seen. AMD offers free Radeon Prorender plugins for various industry packages, including 3ds Max, Maya and Blender. With the Blender plugin, a scene that took a couple of days on the CPU alone took 20 minutes 21 seconds with the GPU when harnessed via Radeon Prorender.
The Armari V25R-RA760G2 really shows what AMD’S new Ryzen 7 can deliver. It is behind the Armari V25 we reviewed in our small form factor group test for sheer performance, but it’s also about half the price of that configuration. As a budget workstation that isn’t much of a compromise, this is a stunning system for its cost and bodes well for the future of AMD’S resurgent processor offerings.