Memory madness
This was a surprisingly easy build.
The Enthoo Pro 2 needs more cable-management solutions, but it’s a big case with a bunch of useful tricks up its sleeve to make the build process run smoothly. Installing extra drives or case fans is a cinch; the upgrade potential for this build is nearly unlimited. There’s a tonne of space for extra HDDs and SSDs, and our power supply has more than enough juice for them. The M.2 Aero riser card packaged with the motherboard means we could have up to seven M.2 SSDs – excessive for us, but perhaps not to those who routinely handle vast quantities of data.
The Threadripper 3970X dominated our benchmarks, surprising nobody. Those 64 threads made short work of every CPU-bound task we threw at it, from Cinebench R15 to the more data-oriented HiBench (missing from our table, as we don’t have a comparable zero-point). Graphical performance was also solid, as expected from the RX 5700 XT. You may want to swap out your GPU based on whether you need 3D-modelling and rendering performance.
The Sabrent Rocket 4.0 did well, only lagging behind the Corsair Force MP600 by a few percent. In practice, this won’t be a noticeable difference; performance does tend to drop during lengthy file transfers as the drive heats up, but this is true of just about any M.2 SSD. The IronWolf Pro HDD didn’t blow us away, but it spins quietly and provides plenty of initial storage.
Thermal performance was reasonable throughout our tests, although we’d advise upgrading to a beefier cooling solution if you’ve got manual overclocking in mind. Since this machine was tested in a living room during a heatwave (rather than our climatecontrolled office space), our results and temps may have been skewed. There’s a lot of variables, but our core temps never got too high during general testing.
We did have some serious memory issues. Despite the MSI Creator motherboard being rated for up to 256GB of memory and 3200MHz via either JEDEC standard or A-XMP, we weren’t able to get our 128GB kit running any higher than a measly 1866MHz. This was incredibly annoying, until we were able to pull half the sticks and get the system running at the advertised 3200MHz with 64GB, A-XMP enabled.
We’ll reach out to MSI and try to get to the root of this issue. We had limited time to get this machine up and running, so we pushed ahead and ran our tests with half the memory, but we’ll spend some time figuring out the problem!