Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1-48T
Over 10,000 CUDA cores make this workstation the obvious choice for GPUpowered rendering
SCORE
PRICE £6,667 (£8,000 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk
T he Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1-48T is based around one class-leading feature: its graphics card. This is the only workstation this month with the monster Nvidia Quadro RTX A6000, which alone costs over £4,500 inc VAT. Inevitably, this has meant that Scan has had to make a reduction in another important part of the specification.
The primary area where Scan has compensated for the price of the graphics is in the CPU. Where other manufacturers submitting a workstation in the £8,000 inc VAT category have opted for 32 or 64-core processors, Scan has chosen the 24core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X – which PCSpecialist managed to fit into a machine costing £3,000 inc VAT. This is a capable processor, with a 3.8GHz base clock and boost up to 4.5GHz, but it will fall behind systems with more cores when performing heavily multithreaded tasks like 3D rendering.
Scan has at least partnered the processor with a generous 128GB of DDR4 memory, supplied as four 32GB modules, leaving four DIMM slots free for upgrade on the ASRock TRX40 Creator motherboard.
The star of the show, though, is that graphics card. The Nvidia
Quadro RTX A6000 boasts an almost unfeasible 10,752 CUDA cores, more than twice the previous RTX 6000’s 4,608 cores, and four times that of the Quadro RTX 4000 that was the workhorse workstation GPU until Nvidia’s latest Ampere generation arrived. The A6000 also has a huge 48GB of GDDR6 memory, the same as the Quadro RTX 8000 that costs £1,000 more, but with 768GB/sec bandwidth instead of 672GB/sec. So this is an astonishing graphics card.
Scan hasn’t skimped on storage either, delivering both a fast SSD boot and application device alongside slower but larger secondary storage. But when we say slower, don’t start thinking 5,400rpm hard disks: the secondary storage is still an SSD. The primary device is a PCI Express 4 NVMe M.2 Samsung 980 Pro with 2TB capacity, delivering extremely quick sustained reading of 6,749MB/ sec and writing of 4,949MB/sec. The secondary storage is a SATA-connected 2.5in 4TB Samsung 870 Evo, which achieves 570MB/sec reading and 506MB/sec writing.
If you ever need more storage than this, the motherboard has two more PCI Express 4 M.2 slots free and there are seven SATA ports lying empty empty. However, the Fractal Design Meshify 2 chassis only has six drive bays available as standard and one of these houses the SATA SSD in this configuration already. Still, that will be plenty for most storage upgrade needs.
The performance results for the Scan system show the GPU focus of the spec. The overall
PC Pro benchmark result of 639 is great, and clearly ahead of the other system with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper
3960X, which was held back by its meagre memory allocation.
But other £8,000 systems here were considerably faster. The Cinebench R20 render results also showed where 24 cores fall behind 32 or 64.
However, anything bringing that GPU to bear really flew. The Blender Gooseberry frame render took 350 seconds with the CPU, but less than half as much with the GPU – 167 seconds, the quickest we’ve seen, and faster than a 64-core processor too. The IndigoBench 4 GPU tests are head and shoulders above other systems this month, as is the LuxMark 3.1 score of 18,138, showing that this GPU has almost twice the real-world grunt of the already potent Nvidia Quadro RTX A4000. As you would expect, for real-time 3D viewports as tested by SPECviewperf 2020, scores are generally phenomenal, with 192 in 3ds Max, 494 in Maya, 609 in Siemens NX and 355 in SolidWorks, although Catia and Creo results were behind some other systems.
Overall, if your workloads involve GPU-powered rendering or working with huge visualisation datasets, this workstation will be superb. However, if you perform tasks that require more multithreaded CPU processing, a lesser graphics card and processor with more cores might be the more cost-effective option.