The best professional workstations for any budget

Workstation Specialists is a small but focused UK-based manufacturer of systems for content creators. As its previous machines have demonstrated, the company has a good handle on hardware trends in this market, and this is another system based around AMD’s stunning Threadripper 3970X.

Although the CPU supports 3,200MHz memory, Workstation Specialists has only used 3,000MHz DDR4 SDRAM – but this means it can supply 128GB of it. It sensibly chooses Nvidia’s Quadro RTX 5000, which balances well with the high-end CPU. With 3,072 CUDA cores and 16GB of GDDR6 frame buffer providing 448GB/sec of bandwidth, this card will tackle any 3D modelling task with aplomb. The Antec P110 Luce chassis is particularly stylish, with a sleek unfussy exterior and tempered glass side panel, but it doesn’t have USB-C at the front. However, the ASRock TRX40 Creator motherboard provides both 2.5Gbit and 10Gbit networking.

Workstation Specialists has sensibly chosen a 2TB Gigabyte Aorus NVMe M.2 SSD as main storage, which supports PCI Express 4. But we only recorded reading at 3,463MB/sec and writing at 3,461MB/sec, which are more like PCI Express 3 speeds. The 4TB Toshiba N300 7,200rpm hard disk is a good capacity for large media asset files, but with 209MB/sec reading and 208MB/sec writing, it’s also slower than the hard disks supplied with other systems this month.

This proved the fastest system in our benchmarks, however, achieving a phenomenal 711 overall and a particularly stunning 896 in multitasking. On the other hand, the WS-1640A-G4 is 7% behind Armari’s Magnetar with 17,098 in Cinebench R20 and took 5% longer to complete the Blender Gooseberry render on CPU. Its CPU scores in IndigoBench 4 were similarly lower, and it was the slowest 3970X-based system for encoding video with Adobe Media Encoder CC 2020.

As with other systems using the 3970X, the 3D viewset scores in SPECviewperf 13 are mostly on par for a system sporting Nvidia’s Quadro RTX 5000, with a particularly stunning 500 in snx-03, showing strong capability with modelling in all categories.

Overall, this is a well-specified and constructed workstation, with particularly good general media application performance. But otherwise it’s simply put into the shade by the best of the 3970X-based systems.

Workstation Specialists WS-1640A-G4 specifications