Scan 3XS GWP-ME Q164T

PRICE £8,000 inc. VAT | DEVELOPER Scan | WEBSITE www.scan.co.uk

Although it was only a few months ago that we were treated to a new level of mainstream rendering with the 16-core AMD Ryzen 3950X processor, AMD has a new achievement under its belt again with a third-generation Threadripper processor, that contains 32 CPU cores and can execute 64 threads concurrently. This is more cores than any other processor on the market today.

It’s a physically large chip with a hefty 280W TDP. It runs at 3.7GHZ, with a turbo clock speed of 4.5GHZ. And it’s this chip that forms the basis of Scan’s 3XS GWP-ME Q164T workstation, a high-end (£8,000 inc VAT) rig that is designed to tear through the toughest rendering jobs.

If you’re new to 3D, this could sound like a fortune, but the reality is that in any visual creative industry, once you move from consumer-grade components to high-end applications, the hardware costs quickly start to mount up.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of this system is that its cost is relatively reasonable compared with workstations of

the past, and that’s all thanks to the lower per-core pricing of AMD’S new architecture.

It also comes paired with an expensive Nvidia Quadro RTX 6000 graphics card, which accounts for a big chunk of the overall workstation cost. With 4,608 CUDA cores, 576 Tensor cores, 72 RT cores and 24GB of GDDR6 memory, the RTX 6000 has considerably more rendering hardware than the Quadro RTX 5000 and RTX 4000, and is a dream for 3D.

Let’s also not forget 128GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 memory. The result is a rendering monster, but Scan has also put lots of thought into the rest of the specification too. When shelling out £8,000 for a computer, you’d expect all the bells and whistles, and that’s what you get here.

The system drive is a 2TB Corsair PCIE 4.0 SSD that is capable of 5Gb/sec transfer speeds. Then there’s a slower 4TB Samsung SATA drive for working with files, large textures, exporting video, and so on. And a hard disk, with space to add more if required.

The case is a fairly large Fractal Define R6, there’s an 850W Corsair RMX power supply and a 360mm hydro cooler, which has a lot of work to do. The Threadripper 3970X gets very warm, and although the case has as much noise dampening as possible, this is not a silent system. It’s audible when idle, and can be quite noisy when rendering.

But it’s the price you pay for the stellar rendering performance of this hardware. All records were broken, although we didn’t see the 32-core chip give us exactly double the performance of 16 cores across the board. Blender BMW CPU tests completed in one minute, versus two minutes on the 3950X, but in Cinebench 20, it was actually closer to an 85% improvement rather than 100%.

The Quadro RTX 6000 really shines when paired with this processor though. In Specviewperf, numbers were off the charts. Compared with

Quadro RTX 4000 workstations we’ve looked at a while ago, this workstation provides an approximate overall average of 50% greater GPU rendering performance, but it all varies depending on the test. The 3ds Max and Maya scores were around 40% higher, while other tests showed a bigger improvement.

The ever-important Opencl results gave bigger gains, with around 80% improvement and close to 100% in the most demanding Hotel section of the Luxmark benchmark.

Of course we’re seriously impressed by this workstation. It’s the most powerful rendering rig we’ve ever tested and crucially, it lets us try out effects, resolutions and scenes in software that we simply thought impossible before.

Should you buy it though? We’ll answer that question at the end of this feature.

Reach new rendering heights with AMD’S 32-core Threadripper 3970X CPU and Nvidia’s Quadro RTX 6000 GPU “WHEN SHELLING OUT £8,000 FOR A COMPUTER, YOU’D EXPECT ALL THE BELLS AND WHISTLES, AND THAT’S WHAT YOU GET”

VERDICT