Wired2fire Apollo WS video editing workstation
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PRICE £3,479 / $4,370 COMPANY Wired2fire Ltd WEBSITE wired2fire.co.uk
After Wired2fire previously sent us the impressive Artemis workstation, it encouraged us to experience a slightly lower-cost proposition this time aimed at video production workflows. The Apollo WS continues the spacefaring naming convention. However, instead of the AMD Threadripper technology of the Artemis, it uses the latest Intel platform combined with an Nvidia RTX GPU to offer a punchy editing solution.
In January 2022, Intel unleashed its new Alder Lake platform and a slew of processor options that exploit the extra bandwidth available with DDR5 memory and Gen4 PCIE M.2 storage.
Mounted in the popular Fractal Design Define 7 enclosure and accompanied by an MSI Geforce RTX 3070 Ti Ventus 3X video card, this combination makes for a powerful yet surprisingly quiet solution.
Video editing workflows don’t inherently need such a powerful video card. But the increased use of more compute orientated effects in post-processing and greater than 4K resolutions can make having the extra performance remarkably useful. And, if the workstation does other duties that involve CAD, 3D rendering, simulations or game graphics, it won’t disappoint.
Even with the RTX 3070 Ti Ventus GPU, the CPU is truly centre stage here, relegating the GPU to the role of best supporting actor.
Wired2fire has options for Apollo systems with less computing horsepower than the Intel Core i9-12900k processor in our review machine, but they all come with the Asus Proart Z690CREATOR WIFI edition motherboard installed.
The Intel i9-12900k is an unusual design sporting 16 cores, split equally into performance and efficiency cores. The efficiency cores aren’t hyper-threading, and therefore this chip processes only 24 simultaneous threads.
That might seem a retrograde step over an AMD Zen 3 Threadripper design with 16 cores and 32 threads. But, the efficiency cores allow for more granular control of the heat management in the chip, with each core type being clocked independently.
With a base clock of 3.2GHZ, the performance cores can boost to 5.2GHZ as required, and the efficiency cores go from a base of 2.4GHZ up to 3.9GHZ in Turbo mode.
For those curious, it is possible to disable the efficiency cores and then have that unused chip space provide a heat sink for the performance cores to run at higher speeds.
As that last statement infers, this system is mostly about choices, and the Asus Proart Z690-CREATOR WIFI edition motherboard provides even more with its spectacular feature set.
The highlights include three M.2 PCIE Gen4 slots, with only one occupied by default. It sports two Thunderbolt 4.0 ports, providing greater bandwidth for external storage attachment. Connectivity is also best-in-class, with Wifi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 functionality preinstalled, alongside the wired networking options of 2.5GBE and 10GBE ports.
For card installations, there are three x16 slots, two being PCIE 5.0 specification and the other PCIE 3.0, and two 1X slots for extra LAN cards for lower bandwidth cards.
The connectivity on offer exceeds that in the Artemis and makes the Apollo a much more flexible solution that would be easier to repurpose.
The one place it might have been better was in the default storage options. The review system came with the top specification Samsung 980 Pro 2TB SSD and a 4TB Seagate hard drive. The Samsung is a good performer, but it was one of the first Gen4 drives, and there are now slightly faster options with even greater TBW (total bytes written) endurance. That last part might be critical for video editing, as this is one of the workloads that can exhaust Nand-based storage if heavily used.
Thankfully, the spare M.2 slots provide options to use other NVME drives that would offer a better performance balance with the 980 Pro than the Seagate Barracuda 4TB, and make cloning the existing system to a faster or bigger NVME drive easy.
These are minor complaints, and overall, this is a remarkably solid design with an impressive performance profile.
It’s also from a company with a solid reputation for constructing solutions from the best possible parts. If the exact specification isn’t to your liking, Wired2fire can customise the build to add more memory, storage and a more powerful GPU. Or, conversely, tone it down for a specific budget.
We thought the Wired2fire Artemis was one of the best pre-built systems we’d encountered, but the Apollo turned out to be even better.
“THE CPU IS TRULY CENTRE STAGE HERE, RELEGATING THE GPU TO THE ROLE OF BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR”