WORKSTATIONS Yoyotech Redback N6 WS
The Redback N6 confirms AMD as a serious workstation contender again – and there’s plenty more to come
The Ryzen 7 has put AMD right back in the picture for enthusiast PCs, but it has clear potential for professional users too. Our first taste of the new AMD CPU in workstation guise comes from Yoyotech, with the Redback N6 WS. This system also showcases AMD’s flagship single-GPU professional graphics, the Radeon Pro WX 7100, although Vega ( see below) will soon arrive.
The Redback sports the current top Ryzen 7, the 1800X. This eight-core processor runs at a native 3.6GHz, with a 4GHz turbo mode. It also sports Simultaneous Multithreading, where each core handles two threads in a similar fashion to Intel’s HyperThreading. In other words, this processor supports 16 threads, which is ideal for tasks such as 3D rendering.
One area of weakness that Ryzen 7 has versus Intel’s eight-core CPUs is that it only supports dual-channel memory, rather than quad-channel, but at least this system has plenty of it. Yoyotech includes 32GB of 2,400MHz DDR4 SDRAM, supplied as four 8GB G Skill Flare X modules. If you want even more – the Asus Crosshair VI Hero motherboard supports up to 64GB – then bear in mind these four modules fill all the available slots.
A touch of style
Yoyotech clearly believes workstations should look just as good as their gaming counterparts, choosing to house all this power inside a Game Max Onyx RGB Tempered Glass chassis – complete with screw-on glass panels on front and sides. It’s a super-stylish chassis, with LED lighting you can control via a button on the top. The CPU temperature is kept in check by NZXT Kraken X31 watercooling, and there’s a 650W EVGA Gold 80PLUS power supply, which will be sufficient for the components included.
Storage is the usual configuration we see on modern workstations, with a solid-state disk for operating system and applications, plus a conventional hard disk for data and content. The SSD is a 256GB Samsung Evo 960 with
an NVMe interface – the SSD Labs Winner this month ( see p76) – and the regular hard disk a 7,200rpm 2TB Toshiba DT01ACA200. The Samsung SSD boasts 2.3GB/sec reading and 1.36GB/sec writing, which is extremely quick, while the hard disk provides 195MB/sec reading and 189MB/sec writing, which is decent in its class. If you want an optical drive or memory card reader then you’ll need to specify this at the time of purchase.
Performance review
This brings us to the most interesting aspect of the Redback – performance. Its Maxon Cinebench R15 rendering score of 1,615 is close to scores we’ve seen from Intel’s eight-core Core i7-6700K, showing what the Ryzen 7 1800X CPU can deliver – for half the price. Similarly, the scores in PC Pro’s 4K benchmarks are outstanding: an overall score of 277 shows it’s almost three times as fast as our reference PC, a 3.4GHz Core i5-4670K system with 4GB of RAM. That breaks down to 50% faster at image editing and over three times as fast when multitasking.
The Maxon Cinebench R15 OpenGL result of 116.2 isn’t quite so impressive, however, with scores in SPECviewperf 12.1 similarly variable. The 3dsmax-05 result of 130 is very good, but 112.6 in catia-04 is merely decent. The maya-04 result of 61.1 is behind what Nvidia’s Quadro P4000 could deliver, as is 121.6 in sw-03. In short, the Radeon Pro WX 7100 makes this a very good system for modelling, but the slightly more expensive Nvidia Quadro P4000 would be even better.
Fortunately, AMD’s graphics cards have another trick to play. We also ran the Luxmark 3.1 OpenCL test, and the Redback achieved 721 with its CPU alone, 2,672 with just its GPU, and 3,455 with both combined. Nvidia’s Quadro P5000 scores around 3,500, and costs almost as much as this entire system: this shows the potential AMD graphics has with OpenCL-based rendering.
The Yoyotech Redback N6 WS showcases AMD’s newfound strengths well
– particularly when you look at the price. The 1800X effectively matches eight-core CPUs from Intel for half the money, and that’s reflected in a relatively low total system price. We can’t wait to see what Ryzen Threadripper and Vega will deliver in the coming months. JAMES MORRIS
SPECIFICATIONS
3.6GHz AMD Ryzen 7 1800X 32GB ● 2,400MHz DDR4 SDRAM AMD Radeon Pro ● WX 7100 graphics with 8GB GDDR5 memory
256GB Samsung Evo 960 M.2 NVMe SSD ● ● 2TB Toshiba 7,200rpm hard disk Windows ● 10 Pro 64-bit 3yr warranty (30-day C&R, 1yr ● parts and labour, 2yr labour only)