Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1-24R
A well-balanced system but there are more powerful CPUs for the money in this month’s test
SCORE
PRICE £2,500 (£3,000 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk
S can has a reputation to uphold, as the winner of our last workstation Labs and a regular recipient of awards for showcasing the latest tech. The 3XS GWP-ME A1-24R is another amazing mixture of cutting-edge components.
At the centre is a 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, which has a 3.7GHz base clock and 4.8GHz turbo. Scan has partnered the 5900X with a healthy 64GB of DDR4 memory, supplied as two 32GB modules to take advantage of the processor’s dual-channel memory ability but leaving two DIMM slots free on the Asus ProArt B550 Creator motherboard for upgrade.
Graphics acceleration is as expected at the lower price – Nvidia’s Quadro RTX A4000. This is a big step up from the Quadro RTX 4000, providing a whopping 6,144 CUDA cores and 16GB of GDDR6 memory with 448GB/sec bandwidth. This is essentially the same memory quantity and performance as the previous Quadro RTX 5000, but with twice the CUDA cores.
Scan is part of a trend we’ve seen in this Labs ( see opposite), only supplying an SSD for storage, rather than an additional secondary hard disk as well. But it’s a potent 2TB Samsung 980 Pro
unit, which uses the PCI Express 4 NVMe interface to deliver stunning sustained reads of 6,797MB/sec and writing at 4,950MB/sec. This is classleading performance.
If you need more storage, there’s a second M.2 slot available for another NVMe drive. The Fractal Design Meshify 2 chassis offers six 2.5/3.5in bays for further storage devices. The Asus motherboard also provides a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports at the rear for fast external storage connectivity.
Performance results show a strong range of capabilities, with 516 in the
PC Pro benchmarks and 7,838 in Cinebench R20. However, with other manufacturers offering 16 or even 24 cores at this price, CPU performance is behind the competition. Putting this in perspective, the Scan system took 559 seconds to complete the Blender render with CPU, and a CPU-only video encode took 249 seconds, although this dropped to 166 seconds with the GPU. SPECviewperf 2020 results are as expected for the Nvidia Quadro
RTX A4000 graphics, with the LuxMark 3.1 score of 10,276 on par as well.
Overall, the Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1-24R is an excellent workstation, but the 12-core processor lets it down in this month’s company.