THEPERFECT IN-HOUSEUPGRADE

life can change your working How two years of upgrades

THAT’S ONE HELL OF an upgrade. We’ve gone from 6 to 16 cores, 32GB to 128GB of RAM, and 240GB to 1.2TB of PCIe SSD storage. We’ve also added an additional 21TB of backup storage, swapped out to a larger motherboard, featuring a butt-load more connectivity, introduced an on-site RAID 1 array, and switched the Phanteks Eclipse P400S TG chassis for the masterfully crafted Evolv ATX TG. Hello, aluminum—boy, we’ve missed you.

But it’s performance that’s king here, and performance is what you get with such a crazy upgrade. As this is going to be a personal system update for our reviews editor, testing methodology and system setup are less clinical than with our usual builds. Typically, we do a fresh install of Windows 10, update it, then only install the programs necessary for benchmarking. In that way, no resources are held up by antivirus or superfluous apps, and we can get the best figures out of it.

In this scenario, however, there’s a ton of additional programs we need for our day-to-day work, including game clients, cloud sharing, LibreOffice, and a fair chunk of the Adobe suite. And to maintain benchmark integrity, the new build needs to mimic the old one, so we’ve added a few tweaks to increase performance: Overclocking the CPU to 4GHz (by simply changing the ratio) was our first step, then tweaking the memory DOCP settings (think XMP, but for AMD).

The latter was where we came unstuck. No matter what we tried, using the Asus-supported DOCP 3,200MT/s profile forced the system into a reboot loop, before resetting to default memory settings (2,133MT/s). We got in touch with Asus, and it seems that Threadripper only supports 128GB ( 8x 16GB) up to 2,933MT/s, at the moment. Whether this is a limitation of the platform or it just requires a new AGESA update from AMD is yet to be established, so for the time being, we’re forced to run this kit at 2,933, until support is added.

So, the figures. What a difference! A 230 percent gain in Cinebench, a phenomenal increase in decompression and compression speeds, and a fantastic improvement in real-world benchmarks. Those real-world figures are produced from a one-minute video in Premiere Pro, and a 12-second intro in After Effects; longer projects, particularly in After Effects, would see far more benefit from prolonged access to all 128GB of RAM.

For us, this system is a dream come true, but for the rest of the world, the $6,000 price tag is extortionate. However, a lot of the outlay is on the storage and memory. Given what we know now, by stepping down to a 64GB 3,200MT/s kit, and a more affordable storage solution (a 512GB Samsung 960 Pro, 1TB Crucial MX300 SSD, and two 5TB Toshiba X300 drives), you could bring the price down to $3,700. Still a lot of dollar, but far easier to stomach for a rendering rig.

AMD has again changed the CPU world for the better, and with Intel responding with more affordable and more powerful cores sooner than we thought, it’s looking increasingly sunny for consumers.