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This review first appeared in issue 361 of PC Pro.
Zircon is a gemstone not to be confused with the synthetically produced cubic zirconia. Instead, it’s a naturally occurring gold-hewed mineral that comes in a variety of shades. PCSpecialist clearly considers its high-end entry to be a bit of a gem and it’s certainly packed with cutting-edge components.
Despite the return of the non-Pro AMD Ryzen Threadripper, PCSpecialist opted not to go with this variant for the Zircon Extreme workstation. Instead, it uses the 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7975X. This offers 64 threads and runs at the same frequencies as the non-Pro version – a base 4GHz with 5.3GHz boost. However, the Pro processor supports eight-channel memory and has 128 PCI Express 5 lanes, so can offer higher memory bandwidth while supporting many more high-speed peripherals than the vanilla Threadripper.
Strangely, however, although PCSpecialist has included a healthy total of 256GB DDR5 RAM memory running at 4,800MHz, this is supplied as four 64GB DIMMs rather than eight 32GB ones. This means that you can’t take advantage of the extra bandwidth from the eight-channel memory capability unless you add another four DIMMs. On the plus side, while we don’t envisage 256GB feeling like too little during the lifetime of this system, the Asus Pro WS WRX90E Sage SE motherboard has four DIMM slots free for upgrade and seven PCI Express 5 x16 slots, although one of these only operates in x8 speed mode.
Despite the Threadripper Pro having a significantly higher price than the equivalent Threadripper, PCSpecialist has still managed to include AMD’s flagship graphics acceleration. The Radeon Pro W7900 has 6,144 Stream processors and a huge 48GB of GDDR6 frame buffer with 864GB/sec of bandwidth.
PCSpecialist has taken a traditional approach to storage with the Zircon Extreme, providing one faster, smaller drive for the operating system and apps allied with a larger, slower one for general data. The former is hardly small, however. It’s a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe M.2 unit, although this is a PCI Express 4 drive, delivering 7,463MB/sec sustained reading and 6,985MB/sec sustained writing in CrystalDiskMark 8. The data drive is a 10TB Seagate IronWolf Pro 7,200rpm conventional hard drive, capable of 262MB/sec reading and 258MB/sec writing. This enterprise-grade disk comes with a three-year data recovery service and a 2.5 million-hour MTBF backed by a five-year warranty.
The chassis is also conventional – a Fractal Define 7 XL. This is the larger sibling of the case supplied by InterPro this month. This version includes eight 2.5/3.5in drive brackets and two 2.5in brackets, with up to 23 drive positions possible. PCSpecialist has equipped the chassis with a potent 1,000W Corsair RMx series PSU, so you can happily add power-hungry components to this system.
Unsurprisingly, with the same number of cores of the same generation as the Scan £10,000 system’s AMD Ryzen Threadripper, the Threadripper Pro in the Zircon Extreme performs very similarly in CPU tests. The PC Pro media benchmarks score of 866 is just one point lower, with identical video-encoding and multitasking results of 816 and 1,096 respectively. Only the image-editing score drops behind at 274. The Cinebench 2024 multi-CPU rendering score of 3,493 is a tad ahead of the Scan, too, although the Blender Gooseberry frame took 165 seconds, around 10 seconds longer. We can’t help thinking that all these results would have been higher had PCSpecialist taken advantage of the Threadripper Pro’s eight-channel memory.
The flagship Radeon Pro W7900 certainly shows how much AMD has to offer graphics acceleration these days, though. The SPECviewperf 2020 scores of 291 in 3dsmax-07 and 1,057 in maya-06 make this the fastest system for 3D animation viewsets this month. CAD and engineering workloads are also impressive, with 210 in catia-06, 278 in creo-03, 772 in snx-04 and 598 in solidworks-07, although these aren’t the fastest in every area. The GPU also delivers the second-best inferencing performance with Geekbench ML at 28,093 and a third best 17,255 in LuxMark 3.1 OpenCL.
Overall, this is a very competent system from PCSpecialist with great performance across the board, but spending extra on the Pro version of the Threadripper without providing eight memory DIMMs is a missed opportunity.
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