Armari Gravistar R-AD750EX
A highly capable workstation for every type of workload type – a great alternative to the InterPro
SCORE
PRICE £2,499 (£2,998 inc VAT) from armari.com
A lthough Armari designs its own cases, for more budgetconscious models it sticks with generic chassis. But this is no run-of-the-mill workstation.
The system is based around AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X, which is the best processor currently on the market for a workstation at this price. Combining 16 cores with a 3.4GHz base clock and 4.9GHz boost, this CPU will be great with both single and multithreaded workloads. Armari also partners the Ryzen 9 with 64GB of DDR4 memory. This is supplied as two 32GB modules, taking advantage of the processor’s dual-channel memory architecture but leaving two DIMM slots on the Asus ROG Strix B550-XE Gaming free for upgrade.
Graphics acceleration is as expected at this price: Nvidia’s Quadro RTX A4000. This monster 3D card boasts 6,144 CUDA cores and 16GB GDDR6 memory with 448GB/sec of bandwidth. It also supports resolutions up to 7,680 x 4,320 at 60Hz, for a truly huge workspace. Yet it’s a single-slot card with a 140W power consumption.
Armari has chosen to provide just a main storage device, but it’s a 1TB unit, which should be enough unless you need to work with lots of large media files. It’s a superfast Samsung 980 Pro PCI Express 4 NVMe M.2 drive, delivering 6,756MB/sec sustained reading alongside 4,968MB/sec writing. If you ever need more storage, there’s another M.2 slot free on the motherboard and six SATA connectors. The Corsair 4000D Airflow chassis includes two 2.5in and two 3.5in bays to add drives.
The Gravistar showcases the prowess of the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processor, with a great overall score of 582 in the PC Pro benchmarks. The Maxon Cinebench R20 result of 10,273 is excellent, too, with the system also taking just 438 seconds to complete the Blender Gooseberry render on CPU. This dropped to 254 seconds using the Nvidia GPU, showing just how powerful this accelerator is. The SPECviewperf 2020 results reveal this card is also supremely good with every visualisation workload from CAD, engineering and product design to 3D animation.
It was extremely difficult to choose between this system and the InterPro this month. They both offer a very similar specification for the money. In the end, InterPro just edged it on general workload performance, but this is still a brilliant £3,000 workstation that is well worth considering.