Armari Magnetar V25 Pro
An amazing chassis design packs a huge amount into a tiny package that is aimed at VR content creation
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T£3,897 (£4,676 inc VAT) he Armari Magnetar V25 Pro is unusual in this month’s Labs in lots of ways. For a start, the chassis is blue, where every other workstation on test is black. It’s also tiny, more like the kind of pizza box size you might expect gracing a reception desk rather than a content creation studio. But stuffed inside this tiny case is a powerful eight-core processor and two graphics cards. So this is still a potent machine.
The Magnetar V25 Pro, in the specification sent to us, is specifically aimed at creating VR ( see Back to virtual reality, p86). Nestled in the base of the unit is a breakout box for an HTC Vive headset, although this is also compatible with Oculus Rift. Note that it was supplied for demonstration only, and isn’t included in the price above (it adds about £50, plus the cost of the Vive headset). The case itself is a custom unit designed by Armari, so won’t be available from any other company.
Despite the diminutive size of the V25 Pro, the ASRock X99E-ITX/ac motherboard inside supports Intel Haswell-E processors including Xeon E5 v4 CPUs all the way up to 22 cores (if you have the £4,000 spare this CPU costs). However, Armari has decided to balance power with cost and supplied the eight-core Intel Core i7-6900K instead, running at 3.2GHz with a 3.7GHz Turbo Boost mode. It also hasn’t chosen to permanently overclock this, as is usually the way with Core i7s.
However, with Hyper-Threading on hand, there are 16 threads available so this should be a pretty potent processor. The motherboard only sports two DIMM slots, but Armari has filled both of these with 32GB DDR4 DIMMs running at 2.4GHz, for a total of 64GB. This will be more than enough for most content creation tasks, including VR.
Powerful processing isn’t the only surprising thing packed into the V25 Pro. The motherboard only sports one 16x PCI Express slot, but a riser card flips the orientation of this so that two graphics cards or other PCI Express devices can be supported. One of these can be dual-width, too, meaning even massive adapters such as the Nvidia Quadro P6000 will still fit in this chassis, with another PCI Express device alongside. This would mean both slots operate at 8x, but a single card will get the full 16x benefit.
Since our sample was aimed at VR content creation, Armari shipped it with dual AMD Radeon Pro WX7100 graphics. This is our first glimpse of the new Polarisbased Radeon Pro range from AMD, which replaces the FirePro that hadn’t seen a refresh since 2014. The WX7100 has 2,048 stream processors compared to the 1,792 in the FirePro W7100 it replaces, but it promises nearly twice as much compute power, although memory remains at 8GB of GDDR5. Armari has chosen to supply two cards to provide the best possible performance with AMD’s ProRender software for the money.
The V25 Pro supports up to five SSDs – two PCI Express and three SATA – but this particular sample sticks with a single drive. Fortunately, it’s a sizeable 1TB Samsung SM961 NVMe PCI Express M.2 unit. This is an incredibly rapid SSD, providing sequential reads at 3.2GB/sec and writes at 1.6GB/sec.
Performance elsewhere is commendable, but shows the focus of this particular specification, with an eight-core processor where most other systems used ten or more, and the AMD graphics. Only the PC Specialist and Yoyotech lagged behind in Maxon Cinebench R15 rendering and the PC Pro Media Benchmarks, although the Armari’s scores can hardly be criticised. The AMD Radeon Pro WX7100, whilst clearly superior to the Nvidia Quadro M4000 in most modelling applications, can’t compete with the P5000 or P6000 either.
But this system is aimed at OpenCL rendering, and the two cards together produced a LuxMark 3.1 score of 5,225 – around the same as Nvidia’s Quadro P6000, which costs more than this entire system on its own. As a hugely compact platform for AMD’s ProRender software, the Armari Magnetar V25 Pro is a triumph of powerful engineering.