Workstation Specialists WS-1640A-G4
A phenomenally powerful workstation that will dispatch any workload with ease
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PRICE £6,667 (£8,000 inc VAT) from workstationspecialists.com
W orkstation Specialists has spared almost no expense with the WS-1640A-G4. Powerful processor, powerful graphics, plenty of storage, loads of memory – there isn’t a weak spot with this system. It’s been configured to deliver the best possible contentcreation experience in every area.
The centrepiece of the WS1640A-G4 is its 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X. This runs at a nominal 2.9GHz with a 4.3GHz turbo mode, so will deliver excellent performance with single-threaded applications alongside its allencompassing multithreaded abilities. Sensibly, Workstation Specialists has partnered this processor with 128GB of DDR4 memory supplied as four modules to take advantage of the quad-channel Ryzen Threadripper memory architecture. This leaves four DIMM slots free on the ASRock TRX40 Creator motherboard, should you ever feel the need to upgrade to this system’s 256GB maximum.
The graphics acceleration is fittingly powerful to go with this processor. Nvidia’s Quadro RTX A5000 delivers a phenomenal 8,192 CUDA cores and huge 24GB of GDDR6 memory with 768GB/sec bandwidth. This makes it more powerful than the near-£6,000 inc VAT Nvidia Quadro RTX 8000, albeit with half the memory. This card will be able to handle huge texture sets and models, while also providing immense GPU compute capabilities. It can also support monitors up to 7,680 x 4,320 at 60Hz via its four DisplayPort 1.4 connections, as well as 4K up to 120Hz. With all these capabilities, a 230W maximum power draw doesn’t seem unreasonable.
Primary storage continues the performance theme, with a healthily sized 2TB Samsung 980 Pro NVMe PCI Express 4 M.2 SSD taking the central role. This provides sustained reading rate of 6,719MB/sec and writing at 4,948MB/sec. The secondary storage is the only area we might consider changing with this system. This takes the traditional format of a conventional mechanical hard disk, in this case a 6TB Western Digital Red Pro 7,200rpm SATA drive, offering relatively rapid 250MB/sec sustained reading and 243MB/sec writing. However, the hard disk’s days are clearly numbered at last ( see p93), and a 4TB Samsung 870 QVO SATA SSD would only set you back £100 more whilst providing noticeably quicker performance.
Should you need more storage, the ASRock motherboard still has two M.2 slots free, and the Fractal Define S chassis has three 3.5in/2.5in drive bays plus two for 2.5in drives only. With eight SATA ports on the motherboard, there will be ample options to upgrade to a greater capacity if needed. But with 2TB for OS and applications and 6TB for data, you probably won’t need to.
Apart from the hard disk, this system dominated in most of our tests. The PC Pro benchmarks result of 705 is the fastest we’ve ever seen. The Maxon Cinebench score of 25,017 is also the highest ever, as are the IndigoBench 4 CPU results. The Blender Gooseberry CPU render time of 186 seconds comes top too, and the CPU-only Adobe Media Encoder video-encoding time of 179 is only beaten by PCSpecialist’s Onyx 8000.
The Quadro RTX A5000 delivers a result of 15,570 in LuxMark 3.1, showing how much GPU rendering grunt is available. Similarly, rendering the Blender Gooseberry frame with GPU took 203 seconds, one more second than the other A5000-equipped system here and only beaten by the A6000 in Scan’s £8,000 system. SPECviewperf 2020 results were similarly impressive, with a solid 162 in 3ds Max and an excellent 446 in Maya showing great 3D animation abilities. The results of 503 in Siemens NX and 314 for SolidWorks mean superb abilities with product design and engineering workloads.
There is no weak area in performance for this system, which is what you’d hope after spending £8,000. Both rendering and modelling are supreme. Whatever workload you throw at this system and type of content creation work you perform, the Workstation Specialists WS-1640A-G4 will take it in its stride.