A small artisan workstation vendor called Armari has thrown down the gauntlet with an overclocked monster: the Magnetar X64T.
Earlier this year, it grabbed the top spot for fastest workstation by the SPECWORKSTATION V3 benchmark - a popular test comprised of workstation-relevant workloads.
The UK-based retailer took a 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, overclocked it to a whopping 4GHz on all 64 cores (up from 2.9GHz), loaded it with plenty of memory and a pair of very expensive PNY Quadro RTX graphics cards.
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The (rather impressive) result is a workstation that produces stellar performance, albeit at a steep price. But everything is relative; compared to other Intel-based workstation PCs out there, the Magnetar is a bargain.
As Dr. Ian Cutress of AnandTech put it in his review, "just the [AMD Ryzen] Threadripper 3990X and the [Nvidia] Quadro RTX 6000 together are a base $8000."
"Add in the other hardware, the custom liquid cooling setup with a custom block and the TRX40 motherboard and 256GB of high speed memory, with a 3 year warranty and a free checkup/coolant refill, and I suspect the big OEMs will be hard pressed to match the price. Not only that, the equivalent Intel system, using dual 28-core parts, starts easily costing $20k+ before even looking at memory or graphics.”
For anyone wondering about the name, a magnetar is a type of superdense neutron star, according to our sister publication Space. It is also the most magnetic entity in the universe, with up to one quadrillion Gauss - that's 100 million times stronger than an MRI machine.
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