InterPro IPW-R9
The best workstation performance you can get for the money, with plenty of room for expansion
SCORE
PRICE £2,500 (£3,000 inc VAT) from ipworkstations.com
I nterPro is one of a small group of UK PC manufacturers that focus on computers for professional applications. In every PC Pro workstation Labs test, it shows its ability in this area, and the IPW-R9 is a particularly good example.
This is one of three systems this month to be based on AMD’s punchy Ryzen 9 5950X, which sports 16 cores with a base 3.4GHz clock and 4.9GHz turbo mode. For the £3,000 inc VAT price, it hits the sweet spot, costing a little over half the 24-core Ryzen Threadripper 3960X, for example, yet delivering much more than half the performance. The downside is that the memory configuration is merely dual-channel rather than quadchannel, so you lose on bandwidth. InterPro has wisely supplied 64GB of DDR4 memory in the form of two 32GB modules, leaving two DIMM slots free for upgrade on the Asus Crosshair VIII Dark Hero motherboard.
Unsurprisingly at this price, graphics acceleration is provided by the Nvidia Quadro RTX A4000, which takes over as the mainstream high-end workstation 3D workhorse from its RTX 4000 predecessor. It’s a significant upgrade, with 6,144 CUDA cores and 16GB of GDDR6 memory delivering 448GB/sec bandwidth. Far from being just a great real-time 3D viewport card, the A4000 also offers serious GPU compute ability.
If there’s one area where you might want to consider an upgrade at some point with this workstation, it’s storage. InterPro has chosen to go with a single drive, although only one manufacturer this month has stuck with the traditional two-drive configuration at this price. Thankfully, it’s a large, 2TB Samsung 980 Pro NVMe PC Express 4 M.2 device, which appears to be the performance favourite, with seven of this month’s machines using versions of the same drive. It’s not hard to see why when you consider the Samsung delivered 6,725MB/sec sustained reading alongside 4,956MB/sec writing. Plus, unusually, the second M.2 slot also supports PCI-E 4.0 so you’re well set up for the future.
If you need to add even more storage, for example to work on capacity-intensive video production, then the motherboard has eight SATA ports sitting empty. This is where the Fractal Design Define 7 chassis will come in handy: it offers two 3.5/2.5 3.5/2.5in drive mounts, alongside four 2.5in-only mounts, even if only two trays are included for the latter. That should still be plenty to add a few SATA-based SSDs for fast secondary storage ( see
“View from the Labs” on p93).
Although the InterPro’s 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X can can’t compete with the more expensive systems offering more cores, it still acquits itself extremely well. The overall score of 598 in the
PC Pro benchmarks is the highest at this price, as is the Cinebench R20 result of 11,039. The CPU scores in IndigoBench are only surpassed by the PC Specialist Onyx 3000’s 24-core processor in the £3,000 category. The Blender Gooseberry CPU render time of 403 seconds is similarly only 7% slower than the Onyx 3000.
With GPU-powered workloads, the InterPro isn’t quite so dominant, with a few frames per second lost in some SPECviewperf 2020 tests, and the Catia result being surprising. But in most viewsets it was in the same ballpark as other systems with the Nvidia Quadro RTX A4000, as was the Blender Gooseberry GPU render. The LuxMark 3.1 score of 10,185 was a little behind, but by less than 3%. Overall, ll, we’d argue that a few frames ames per second when modelling odelling and designing is going oing to have less of a negative egative effect on your workflow orkflow than slower general eneral productivity and rendering. ndering. There are three quite uite similar systems at this his price, including this one, ne, the Armari’s Gravistar R-AD750EX, -AD750EX, and the Chillblast hillblast Fusion Ryzen Render ender RTX A4000. All are excellent xcellent workstations for the he money, and Armari runs this his system very close, but InterPro nterPro just squeaks past on overall verall performance.