PCSpecialist Onyx 8000
A promising work-inprogress debut for the 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX
PRICE £6,667 (£8,000 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews
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CSpecialist’s £8,000 inc VAT system was still in development at the time of this review, but we got a chance to take a look at it as a work in progress. PCSpecialist has embraced AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper Pro platform to see what it can offer beyond the existing non-Pro option.
It’s gone all in with the top-of-therange Threadripper Pro 3995WX. This comes with a huge 64 cores, as does the 3990X, and like other members of the Pro range it loses a few hundred megahertz on clock speeds over the non-Pro alternative. The base frequency is 2.7GHz compared to the non-Pro’s 2.9GHz, with a top turbo mode of 4.2GHz rather than 4.3GHz.
PCSpecialist has partnered this processor with 128GB of DDR4 memory provided as eight modules to take advantage of the platform’s eight-channel architecture. It has also supplied Nvidia Quadro RTX A4000 graphics, though a higherend member of the Quadro RTX range would fit this processor spec better, such as the A5000 or A6000.
The storage allocation is fully stocked, with a 2TB M.2 SSD for OS and applications, 2TB SATA SSD for the media you’re working on, and a pair of mirrored conventional hard disks for safe asset storage. The main SSD is a Samsung 980 Pro NVMe PCI Express 4 with sustained reading at 6,366MB/sec and writing at 4,950MB/ sec. The Samsung 870 QVO SATA SSD provides reading at 524MB/sec with writing at 460MB/sec, which is behind other SATA SSDs here. The hard disks were slowed by the RAID1 configuration, providing 139MB/sec reading and 202MB/sec writing.
We only ran CPU-based benchmarks because PCSpecialist hasn’t confirmed the graphics it plans to use yet. The PC Pro benchmarks score of 698 is only marginally behind the two Threadripper 3990X systems here. Likewise, the Maxon Cinebench R20 result of 23,401 is a bit slower.
The Blender Gooseberry CPU render took just 189 seconds, faster than one of the 3990X workstations. Only the Adobe Media Encoder time of 172 seconds (software only) was the fastest here; video encoding really likes memory bandwidth.
Overall, this debut bodes well for the Threadripper Pro 3995WX. You lose performance in some areas over the non-Pro 3990X but gain in others where memory bandwidth prevails. If your workloads need this, and the added hardware security, it looks very promising.