Chillblast Fusion Ryzen Render RTX A4000
A hugely powerful workstation for the money, and a close contender for an award this month
SCORE
PRICE £6,667 (£8,000 inc VAT) from chillblast.com
C hillblast’s abilities to put together a capable workstation are in full evidence with the Fusion Ripper Render RTX A5000. With barely any weaknesses, this is a system that will cope with everything your content-creation workflow might throw at it.
Central to the Chillblast system is its 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor. Despite its huge number of cores, this still operates with a base frequency of 2.9GHz and a 4.3GHz boost. Sensibly, Chillblast has partnered this omnipotent CPU with a whopping 128GB of DDR4 memory, supplied as four modules and thereby leaving four DIMM slots free on the Asus ROG Strix TRX40-XE Gaming motherboard for upgrade.
The Nvidia Quadro RTX A5000 is the perfect partner for this processor. With 8,192 CUDA processors and 24GB of GDDR6 RAM, offering 768GB/sec of bandwidth, there’ll be few visualisation workloads this GPU can’t cope with.
If there’s one weak area, it’s the choice of primary storage. This is a PCI Express 4 NVMe SSD, but the Seagate Firecuda 520 only has 1TB capacity. While this drive’s 5,004MB/sec sustained reading and 4,288MB/sec writing
are undoubtedly quick, the Samsung 980 Pro SSDs supplied elsewhere are a third faster. Chillblast’s choice of secondary storage is commendable, however, with a 4TB SATA-connected Samsung 870 QVO supplied. This delivers 548MB/sec reading and 482MB/sec writing, which is twice as fast as any conventional hard disk.
This system’s PC Pro benchmark score of 703 is the second fastest we have ever seen. The Maxon Cinebench R20 result of 24,817 is also the second highest, with similarly impressive IndigoBench 4 scores. It despatched the Blender Gooseberry CPU render in just 191 seconds and the GPU rendering took a mere 202 seconds, only surpassed by Scan’s Nvidia Quadro RTX A6000. The Chillblast’s A5000 also delivers an impressive 15,724 in LuxMark 3.1. Real-time modelling will be excellent with any application type, from engineering and product design to 3D animation. The SPECviewperf 2020 scores are some of the best we have seen, with 167 in 3ds Max, 507 in Siemens NX and 450 in Maya.
The Chillblast Fusion Ripper Render RTX A5000 is as competent as its name is long. It ran the Labs Winner very close, but just misses out due to the storage and slightly lower overall performance.