Hands on: I tested the PCSpecialist Onyx Ultra - see what I thought of this beast of a workstation

An incredibly powerful and well-specified workstation that’s a solid alternative to the Labs-winning Scan

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PCSpecialist Onyx Ultra main image
PCSpecialist includes a top-of-the-range AMD CPU
(Image: © Future)

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This review first appeared in issue 348 of PC Pro.

PCSpecialist has thrown everything at its £10,000 workstation. Not only does it incorporate AMD’s range-topping 64-core Threadripper Pro 5995WX, but it also includes AMD’s latest professional graphics.

The CPU supports multithreading so offers 128 threads. The base clock is 2.7GHz with a boost to 4.5GHz. While there’s no DDR5 support yet for the Threadripper Pro, the eight-channel memory configuration improves bandwidth. PCSpecialist includes a whopping 256GB of 3,200MHz RAM in the form of eight 32GB modules, taking advantage of the extra throughput.

PCSpecialist opts for the brand new AMD Radeon Pro W7800 for graphics acceleration. This combines 4,480 RDNA 3 unified shaders with 32GB of GDDR6 frame buffer operating with 576GB/sec bandwidth.

Two storage devices are supplied with the Ultra. The 2TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe M.2 drive operates at PCI-E 4 speeds. It achieved sustained reading at 7,404MB/sec and writing at 6,818MB/sec. The other storage device is a capacious 10TB Seagate IronWolf Pro 7,200rpm mechanical hard disk, delivering 261MB/sec reading and 253MB/sec writing.

Front view of the PCSpecialist Onyx Ultra

(Image credit: Future)

The Onyx Ultra managed a score of 794 in the PC Pro benchmarks, beaten only by the systems using Intel’s Core i9. Its main weakness 231 in image editing, which is a single-core task. The Cinebench R23 multicore rendering score of 71,519 is phenomenal, although Armari went further with the same processor. The Blender Gooseberry CPU render time of 134 seconds was also behind Armari.

Although the AMD Radeon Pro W7800 is a fantastic new graphics accelerator, it benefits from being paired with fast single-core CPU speeds, which the Threadripper Pro can’t offer. With SPECviewperf 2020 v3.1, the scores of 194 in 3dsmax-07 and 792 in maya-06 are superb, but Armari did better by partnering the GPU with a Ryzen 9 7950X. Similarly, engineering and CAD viewsets were behind. However, a number of these scores were ahead of the Nvidia RTX A5000 and A6000. The LuxMark 3.1 score of 12,317 and Blender GPU time of 153 seconds were more mediocre.

This is a fantastically powerful workstation, although PCSpecialist hasn’t squeezed as much rendering performance out of the CPU or modelling ability from the GPU as Armari. It’s well worth considering, though, with great all-round abilities and lots of storage for media assets.

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James Morris
James Morris

Dr James Morris has worked as a technology journalist for over 25 years, including spending nine years on the staff of market-leading computer magazine PC Pro, the last five of which were as the publication’s editor. He specializes in enterprise-grade software and hardware, with a particular focus on content creation.

What is a hands on review?

Hands on reviews' are a journalist's first impressions of a piece of kit based on spending some time with it. It may be just a few moments, or a few hours. The important thing is we have been able to play with it ourselves and can give you some sense of what it's like to use, even if it's only an embryonic view. For more information, see TechRadar's Reviews Guarantee.

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