This review first appeared in issue 361 of PC Pro.
Armari has been producing some of the best workstations in the UK market for decades and, together with Scan, is often the first to send us the latest technology. The Magnetar M64T7-AW1650G4 isn’t the only system this month to sport one of the recently released non-Pro AMD Ryzen Threadrippers, but it’s the only one to opt for the 64-core iteration.
The Threadripper 7980X has a base 3.2GHz clock across its 64 cores (with 128 threads) and a maximum boost of 5.1GHz. The most obvious difference between the two variants of the Threadripper is that the Pro version supports eight-channel memory, and the non-Pro variant has a quad-channel controller, so will have lower RAM bandwidth. However, the Pro also has 128 PCI Express 5 lanes whereas the non-Pro only offers 48, plus 24 PCI Express 4 lanes. So the Pro will support a greater number of fast peripherals, such as networking and GPUs. Unless you need the memory and peripheral bandwidth, the non-Pro is much cheaper and therefore more cost-effective.
Armari has taken advantage of the quad memory channels by providing four 32GB DDR5 DIMMs running at 5,600MHz, for a total of 128GB. This will be enough for now, although several manufacturers this month have provided a lot more. The Asus Pro WS TRX50 Sage WiFi motherboard supports up to 1TB of memory.
Although the vanilla Threadripper is cheaper than the equivalent Pro, it’s still expensive, so Armari has been more conservative about its graphics acceleration choice. Instead of the range-topping AMD Radeon Pro W7900, the GPU is the W7800 that sits one rung below. This has 4,480 Stream processors instead of 6,144, and 32GB of GDDR6 frame buffer instead of 48GB, with 576GB/sec of bandwidth instead of 864GB/sec.
Also, while there are two storage drives in this system, Armari hasn’t supplied a smaller, faster one for the operating system and applications alongside a larger, slower one for media. Instead, there are two 2TB Crucial T700 M.2 NVMe devices operating at PCI Express 5 speeds. These have been combined using the motherboard’s built-in array capability into a single 4TB RAID0 device. This configuration delivers a staggering 16,134MB/sec of sustained reading and 22,655MB/sec writing (as measured by CrystalDiskMark 8).
One of Armari’s unique features is that it designs its own chassis and cooling solutions, although not for all its systems. The Magnetar M64T7-AW1650G4 sports the latest iteration of Armari’s M60G4 case, which now has some unique airflow tunnelling but most significantly has custom liquid cooling warrantied to deliver 700W for AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive. Armari systems come with the latter enabled to obtain the maximum possible performance while remaining entirely reliable and stable. The chassis also has side-accessible easy-swap caddies for adding up to three 2.5/3.5in drives and another with a U.2 connection that supports SAS or up to three PCI Express 4 NVMe drives. The 1,650W PSU should be more than capable of supplying a fully stocked system without missing a beat, however.
With that 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPU, the Armari was sure to dominate in most of the processor-focused benchmarks. The overall PC Pro media benchmark score of 949 is the highest we’ve seen, and although the image-editing result of 281 isn’t top of the pack, 869 in video encoding and 1,224 in multitasking trounce the competition. Likewise, 6,294 in Cinebench 2024 multi-CPU rendering was more than three times faster than any of the £4,500 systems this month, and 80% quicker than anything else. It dispatched the Blender Gooseberry render in 89 seconds on CPU, way ahead of anything we’ve seen before. The Adobe Media Encoder OpenCL-enhanced render took only 105 seconds.
The GPU, however, is merely great rather than dominant. SPECviewperf 2020 results include 185 in 3dsmax-07 and 817 in maya-06, 139 in catia-06, 221 in creo-03, 601 in snx-04 and 455 in solidworks-07, showing 3D animation and engineering workloads will be dealt with easily. But the W7900 is significantly faster in all areas. GPU rendering and AI inference is similarly good but beaten by a few competitors.
Overall, though, this is another incredible system from Armari, and a worthy Labs Winner.
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