Chillblast Fusion Ripper Render RTX A5000
A balanced configuration, but not as fast in some areas as other workstations with the same core components
SCORE
PRICE £2,500 (£3,000 inc VAT) from chillblast.com
T his Chillblast system is one of three that hit the apparent sweet spot for a £3,000 inc VAT workstation. All three have the same combination of processor, memory quantity and graphics acceleration. Even the chassis is a popular choice.
The processor is the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. This 16-core CPU has a base 3.4GHz clock but a boost all the way up to 4.9GHz, giving it strong ability whether your workload is single or multithreaded. Chillblast has partnered this potent CPU with 64GB of DDR4 memory, supplied as a pair of 32GB modules so there are still two DIMM slots free in the Asus ROG Strix
B550-F Gaming WiFi. This enables dual-channel memory bandwidth.
The graphics acceleration is the third common element: Nvidia’s Quadro RTX A4000 is now the go-to professional 3D workhouse, as were previous generations of the 4000 series. This is a huge leap forward over the last model, however, with 6,144 CUDA cores, 16GB of
GDDR6 memory and faster 448GB/sec bandwidth.
Like all but one machine at this price, the Chillblast only sports one storage device – a PCI Express 4 NVMe drive. However, while the 1TB capacity of the Seagate Firecuda 520 is adequate, it’s not the fastest in its class. Sustained reading of 5,007MB/sec alongside writing at 4,285MB/sec are quick by overall SSD standards, but there are NVMe drives here that are a third quicker still.
Chillblast opts for a Fractal Design Meshify 2 chassis, which gives plenty of room for drive upgrades if you need them. There’s a second NVMe M.2 slot on the motherboard, plus six 2.5in/3.5in drive bays on the chassis for use with the six SATA ports on the Asus motherboard.
The PC Pro benchmark score of 568 is amazing compared to most other PCs we’ve reviewed, but it’s the second slowest this month. The Maxon Cinebench R20 score of 9,788 is also the second slowest, as is the CPU Blender render time of 452 seconds. The Nvidia Quadro graphics perform well, however, with particularly strong SPECviewperf 2020 results in Creo, Maya and SolidWorks.
Of the three systems sporting the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X here, the Chillblast variant is marginally behind on our benchmark tests. This is still a very capable, wellrounded workstation, but there are slightly better performing alternatives elsewhere.