ZERO-
POINT
Cinebench R15 Multi-Thread 987 1,710 (73%)
Cinebench R15 Single-Thread 196 158 (-19%)
CrystalDisk QD32 Sequential Read
(MB/s) 1,895 3,509 (85%)
CrystalDisk QD32 Sequential Write
(MB/s)^949 2,093 (121%)
Rise of the Tomb Raider (fps) 76 32 (-58%)
Far Cry Primal (fps) 72 56 (-22%)
Attila: Total War (fps) 42 28 (-33%)
The Division (fps) 73 56 (-23%)
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%A professional card, such as the AMD Radeon
Pro WX 7100, isn’t essential for many builds, and
if you fancy spending your spare time gaming, an
enthusiast-level card may well be a better option.
For instance, an RX 580 is half the price, and
outperforms it when it comes to gaming.The big selling point of Ryzen is the
multi-threaded performance at a great
price. This machine promotes that ethos
in a succinct way without compromising
in order to get its point across – you could
definitely build a cheaper workstation with
the same core, but it wouldn’t be as
rounded a machine. This is a PC that has
an eye on its price tag, while knocking out
solid performance at the same time.
The build itself was surprisingly
straightforward, with the Corsair Carbide
Air 740 making for a great basis for a
clean build. After constructing so many
ITX systems, it’s refreshing to have so
much room around the motherboard. If
you’re going to augment your own
workstation with plenty of SSDs and hard
drives, this comes heartily recommended- although if you want to install lots of
3.5-inch hard drives, you’re going to need
to come up with your own mounting
system, because the included cage only
holds three drives.
The other component that impressed
us was the Arctic Freezer 33. Even
allowing for the fact we overtightened one
of the mounting screws, and needed to
grab another backplate, we’d still class it
as an easy install. (Besides, that was our
fault, not Arctic’s.) The Arctic Freezer 7
Pro was an incredibly popular option back
when the Core i7-920 was king, and while
it’s doubtful that the Freezer 33 will regain
the throne in these days of all-in-one
coolers, it’s worth considering for your
own builds.
When it came to testing, we could have
left the Ryzen 7 1800X running at stock
speeds, but that would have felt like we
were wasting the chip’s potential. We
couldn’t get this particular chip running at
4GHz stably (it would boot fine, but then
fall over during a benchmarking session),
so settled for a solid 3.9GHz. There is an
argument to be had for not overclocking at
all when dealing with a workstation, but it’s
in our DNA to push CPUs as hard as
possible, and we weren’t about to change
that stance. Even so, for reference, we did
initially run the chip at stock settings, and
saw Cinebench R15 post scores of 149 in
single-threaded loads, and 1,600 with the
multi-threaded test.It’s worth bearing in mind that this is our
standard benchmarking suite for Build It, and
as such it leans toward gaming more than the
hardware in this machine is happy with. The
Radeon Pro WX 7100 is essentially an RX 480
with slightly slower clocks, which equates to a
rather sound thrashing from our zero-point
machine (which employs a Fury X for the
gaming heavy lifting). You can hit smooth
frame rates in most games with some
tweaking, but if you’re serious about relaxing
with your workstation, you would be better off
going with either a more powerful card, or
conversely a cheaper one. To find out more
about the workloads that these machines are
really built for, we suggest checking out the
result of their head to head on p55.3
Our desktop zero-point PC uses a Core i7-6700K CPU @ 4.6GHz, an AMD R9 Fury X, and 32GB of RAM. All games are tested at 1080p on max
settings, with HD texture packages installed.Feature
BUILD IT: RYZEN TO THE CHALLENGE
THE EVERYMAN WORKHORSE
BENCHMARKS
Having the hard drives and power supply in the
back compartment makes for a clean build,
with plenty of room around the motherboard
for good airflow, while providing easy access to
the various ports. All the cutouts make for some
neat cabling options, too.The Arctic Freezer 33 was straightforward
to install, and kept the Ryzen 7 1800X at
comfortable temperatures in use. You may get
a little more overclocking headroom with an
all-in-one water cooler, but the simplicity of this
solution is a good counter to that.2 1