BUILD YOUR OWN RYZEN PC

Budget? No, it’s certainly not that—this is our AMD-powered, plug-and-play, rendering titan

WE’VE GONE A LITTLE AMD MAD this issue, as you can probably tell. The plucky underdog has really rattled the cages of the establishment. And, yes, although there are bugs—slowly being ironed out by developers and OS engineers alike—the value proposition put forward by AMD’s new line-up of 7-series chips opens a whole plethora of new opportunities for those looking to supercharge their HEDT experience.

But first, let’s get one thing straight: This is, by no means, a cheap build. Coming in at almost $5,300, this system holds nothing back when it comes to part selection, particularly on the storage front. Slapping 64GB of high-spec DDR4, 22TB of storage, and an external NAS together bumps the price up by a staggering $3,127, accounting for an incredible 59 percent of the total expense. Selecting 32GB of 2,400MT/s DDR4, a 250GB PCIe SSD, and two 2TB HDDs instead would drop the price by $2,484, bringing it to a far more reasonable $2,804 for a high-end rendering station.

That said, as far as computational performance goes, and value per dollar, the core spec of this build is impressive, to say the least, smashing almost all of our system benchmarks, and hammering our zeropoint system into the ground. With Ryzen’s eight-core processors now cheaper than some of Intel’s four-core Kaby Lake offerings, this could mark the beginning of the end for mainstream quad-core systems…