THREADRIPPER RENDERING STATION

How to spec up your own crazy video-editing workstation of glory

WE’VE BEEN ALLUDING to this build for a while. The king of all systems— for the next month or so, at least. As processor core counts and clock speeds continue to advance ever onward, desktop performance has increased at an exponential rate this last year. We haven’t seen the likes of this since 2010, and it’s a joy to witness.

Big blue and fiery red are at it again— CPU Ragnarök has arrived, and with it, a new wave of performance gains, while the battle of the processor gods for market share rages on.

Threadripper brings the very best of server-grade processing prowess to the HEDT (high-end desktop) platform. We’re no longer limited by a meager 8 or 10 cores, or PCIe lanes stuck below the 40 mark. X399 represents the finest of what the consumer can get their hands on today. With support for up to 128GB of quad-channel DDR4, the aforementioned PCIe greatness, and a plethora of other neat features, it’s currently the go-to platform for anyone who makes a living from the lush green fields of content creation, and ideal for our future plans and development here at MaximumPC.

So, what’s the sitch? Well, we plan to expand our online digital footprint considerably. Although our team works with PC Gamer, we ( the print team) feel there’s not enough content, nor budget for said content, that caters to our readers, you guys—gaming’s nice and all, but it isn’t everything. We’ve been trialing a few things recently, but to further commit to more demanding upload schedules and content creation, we’ve decided to invest heavily into a rendering rig. With Threadripper launching just last month, it makes perfect sense to take advantage of one of our powerhouses of review samples, and dedicate it to a full-time working machine. And our Threadripper of choice is the 16-core 1950X.

This isn’t going to be a cheap system, but given the nature of our work, we can cram it with incredible hardware, which would come with an incredible price tag if we had to pay for it. You can spec out a similar rig for a lot less, and the build process will be almost identical.