armari magnetar s16-trt1000g2
| | PRICE £3,795 plus VAT COMPANY Amari WEBSITE www.amari.com
How does the Ryzen Threadripper perform?
AMD has already made quite a splash with the introduction of its Ryzen 7 processor, but we always knew even more was on the horizon. The Ryzen Threadripper has been one of the most anticipated processor releases in years, and it has significant implications for the 3D content creation market. Illustrating this very persuasively is the Armari Magnetar S16-TRT1000G2 we have on test this month.
The Magnetar is based around the current top Ryzen Threadripper 1950X. Unbelievably, this processor has 16 cores, each one capable of running two threads for a whopping total of 32. The base clock is 3.4GHZ, with a top boost mode of 4GHZ, or 4.2GHZ in XFR mode. There’s also a lesser Ryzen Threadripper with 12 cores, called the 1920X, and an eight-core version called the 1900X that hasn’t arrived on the market yet.
Right now, Intel’s Core i9 stops at ten cores, although the 12-core version is just arriving, with more to come. All of these will be more expensive than the 16-core Ryzen Threadripper 1950X, however. The Ryzen Master software also means you can tune the Threadripper for different usage scenarios, such as Creator and Game modes, and you can set up your own profiles as well. Armari has permanently set its system to 4GHZ across all cores, with custom water cooling to control the temperature.
The CPU is backed by a very healthy 64GB of 3,200MHZ DDR4 SDRAM, although it was running at 2,667MHZ in our sample. This was supplied as four 16GB DIMMS, leaving four slots free for upgrade to the system maximum of 128GB. You probably won’t need to do that for a while, though, as 64GB will be plenty for most professional content-creation activities for some years to come.
Another brand-new AMD product can be found taking care of graphics acceleration. This comes in the shape of the
Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, a curious card that offers gaming drivers and modes as well as professional modes that are accredited to run professional software. This card is a little pricier than an NVIDIA Quadro P4000, but promises performance to match the P5000 in some areas, and absolutely storming GPGPU rendering with Opencl.
The storage takes the familiar approach of a solidstate disk for operating system and applications, plus a regular hard disk for more general data. Both are superb. The Kingston KC1000 SSD is a NVME M.2 unit with 480GB, which can read at close to 2,700Mb/sec and write at 1,600Mb/sec, while the Western Digital GOLD Datacenter hard disk may be just a 7,200rpm SATA unit, but it has 4TB capacity and reads or writes at over 200Mb/sec. So you get immense speed for boot up and software loading, plus loads of space for the content you’re working on.
Armari has also included an 8x Liteon slimline DVD-RW, and there’s plenty of room for more storage. One of the added benefits of Ryzen Threadripper is that it has 64 PCI Express lanes – 20 more than Intel’s top Core i9 processors. So the Armari’s Asrock motherboard has three M.2 NVME SSD slots rather than one. The Armari chassis also has four 3.5in and two 2.5in hot-swap drive bays, providing plenty of space for regular storage expansion.
When it comes to performance testing, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper is in a class of its own. The Maxon Cinebench R15 rendering score of 3,346 is way beyond any single-socket system we have seen before, and close to Intel Xeon dual-socket workstations costing £10,000 or more. You get a huge amount of rendering power for your money. “THE Ryzen THREADRIPPER… HAS Significant implications for THE 3d Content Creation MARKET. illustrating THIS very Persuasively is THE ARMARI MAGNETAR S16-TRT1000G2”
The Ryzen Threadripper’s modelling abilities are a little less outstanding, although there are still some great results. The Maxon Cinebench R15 Opengl score of 136.99 is decent, but no match for the latest NVIDIA Quadro P4000. On the other hand, with Specviewperf 12.1, the 3dsmax-05 result of 151.58 will beat a more expensive P5000, as will 20.6 in energy-01, 85.84 in medical-01, and 108.37 in showcase-01, whilst 116.52 in maya-04 isn’t far off either. However, the catia-04 score of 144.43, 93.43 in creo-01, 148.5 in snx-02 and 118.07 in sw-03 are behind a P4000.
In other words, the graphics performance really depends on what software you are running. The Radeon Vega’s Opencl abilities are unquestionable, however, with 4,822 in Luxmark 3.1, which isn’t far off what NVIDIA’S £5,000 Quadro P6000 can muster. If you’re going to try out AMD’S Prorender plug-in for Blender, Maya, 3ds Max, Solidworks or Cinema 4D, this will be a very powerful and costeffective option.
The Armari Magnetar S16-TRT1000G2 is a great showcase for what AMD’S Ryzen Threadripper is capable of. Its rendering capabilities are well beyond any current singlesocket option from Intel, and close to dual-socket systems costing twice as much. AMD is back in the workstation market, with exciting implications for how much rendering power you can get for your money.