PCSpecialist Onyx 3000
The 24-core processor is commendable, but this has forced compromises in other areas
SCORE
PRICE £2,500 (£3,000 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews
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CSpecialist shows exactly what you can now get for your money with its £3,000 inc VAT system – namely, a whopping 24 cores. But to afford this princely number, the company has been forced to make compromises in other areas.
First, though, that processor – an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X. This 24-core CPU offers a 3.8GHz base clock and 4.5GHz turbo, so it will cope superbly whether you’re performing single-threaded or multithreaded tasks. The memory PCSpecialist has chosen to accompany this is only 32GB, however, which is a bit meagre for 24 cores. This has at least been supplied as four DIMMs, taking advantage of the quad-channel memory architecture of the Ryzen Threadripper, leaving four more slots free for upgrade on the Asus Prime TRX40-Pro S motherboard.
Graphics acceleration is as expected at this price, though. The Nvidia Quadro RTX A4000 delivers a huge 6,144 CUDA cores and 16GB of GDDR6 memory, with 448GB/ sec of bandwidth. This is sure to make short work of any content creation viewport workload.
Storage is another area where savings have been made. PCSpecialist has opted for the traditional combination of a smaller SSD for operating system and applications allied with a larger conventional hard disk.
But the former is a PCI Express 3 NVMe M.2 device with a small 250GB capacity that delivers 3,570MB/sec sustained reading and 2,374MB/sec writing. This isn’t slow, but half as fast as the Samsung PCI Express 4 NVMe drives in some systems this month. The hard disk is a Seagate Barracuda 7,200rpm unit, delivering 210MB/sec reading and 205MB/sec writing, which is mediocre compared to current hard disks.
Performance results show that more cores don’t necessarily mean more speed in everything. The PC Pro benchmark score of 575 is fast but two of this month’s 16-core systems beat it. The Cinebench R20 score of 12,826 is only 16% faster too – from 50% more cores. Graphics viewport results from SPECviewperf 2020 are in line with most other Nvidia Quadro RTX A4000 systems, although the Catia, Creo and Maya results are a little behind. Rending with Blender on the CPU is ahead of other systems at this price, showing the main strength of the 24 cores.
Ultimately, while it’s great to have 24 cores at your disposal, the lack of RAM and small primary storage device unbalance the spec. This is a competent workstation, but other systems here have a more even set of capabilities.