Armari Magnetar M64TPAW1200G3
A promising debut for AMD’s Threadripper Pro, although we’d swap the AMD graphics for Nvidia’s
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PRICE £6,650 (£7,980 inc VAT) from armari.com
A rmari always likes to experiment with bleedingedge technology, and this month’s system reveals a number of components we haven’t seen before at PC Pro. The headline act is that this is our first look at the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro processor, but it also features the latest AMD graphics.
The Ryzen Threadripper Pro in question is the 32-core 3975WX, which is the Pro equivalent of the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X. Aside from the Pro offering eight-channel memory with support for up to 2TB of RAM rather than 256GB, as well as additional hardware security features, the clock speeds are subtly different between the two CPUs. The non-Pro has a 3.7GHz base clock and 4.5GHz turbo mode, but the Pro has a base 3.5GHz and 4.2GHz turbo, and isn’t unlocked, so performance tweaking options are limited.
Armari has backed the processor with a 128GB complement of DDR4 ECC
Registered memory. This is supplied as eight 16GB modules, leaving no DIMM slots free for upgrade on the Asus Pro WS WRX80E-Sage SE WiFi motherboard. However, you need to populate all eight slots to gain the eight-channel memory performance, which is a key feature of this platform and what you pay the extra money for. So it’s a necessary configuration.
The graphics acceleration is unique this month too. An AMD Radeon Pro W6800 has been supplied, which is so new that at the time of writing no vendor was listing it for sale yet. However, the quoted US recommended price of $2,249 is around the same as the RRP for the Nvidia Quadro RTX A5000. On the plus side, where the latter offers a commendable 24GB of GDDR6 frame buffer, the W6800 goes even further with 32GB of GDDR6. It also boasts 3,840 stream processors, compared to the Radeon Pro W5700’s 2,304, but the Radeon Pro WX9100 still beats it with 4,096.
The storage provision is also unique this month. Despite the motherboard sporting three M.2 slots, Armari doesn’t use any of them, instead employing an NVMe RAID card installed into one of the PCI Express x16 slots. This has been populated with a pair of 2TB Samsung 980 Pro NVMe M.2 PCI Express 4 drives, striped as RAID0. The result is a 4TB block of storage delivering an unbelievable 13,024MB/sec sustained reading and 9,920MB/sec writing – almost twice as fast as any other primary storage on test this month.
The Armari chassis is also unique, because the company designs its own cases and this is the latest version of its Magnetar M60G3 P01 Pro Workstation product. It includes neat features such as a custom triplefan water-cooling radiator on a swing-out bracket and four cold-swap bays for 3.5in drives.
Compared to a regular Ryzen Threadripper, the Pro version wins in some areas and loses in others when it comes to performance.
The overall PC Pro benchmark score of 690 is exception, not far off what 64-core processors deliver, and well beyond the 32-core non-Pro. But the Maxon Cinebench R20 score of 16,507 is behind a 32-core non-Pro, showing that raw CPU grunt is a little lower. The fast memory provides some benefits with video encoding, with the Adobe Media Encoder CC 2021 results outperforming anything else this month.
The Blender Gooseberry render took 283 seconds on CPU, which is good, but 64-core processors execute this faster. Curiously, this was one system where the GPU was actually slower for Blender, and this was replicated in the LuxMark 3.1 result of 10,198, which is around the same as a Quadro RTX A4000. SPECviewperf 2020 results were also mostly behind the A4000, with only a strong 3ds Max result of 168 bucking the trend, which actually beats a Quadro RTX A5000.
Overall, Armari has put together a compelling showcase of the latest that AMD has to offer. It’s well worth considering if you want a platform that can go to 2TB of memory and needs as much memory and storage bandwidth as humanly possible. We would swap the AMD graphics for Nvidia’s Quadro RTX A5000, however, unless you mostly run Autodesk 3ds Max.