Armari Magnetar M16E-AW1200-GPU Workstation Review

The Armari Magnetar M16E-AW1200-GPU is an undoubtedly powerful system.

It's rendering abilities are incredible for a single-socket workstation, with some of the fastest Maxon Cinebench CPU scores we have seen. However, as a modelling workstation it is merely good, since modelling benefits from processors with higher clock speeds, rather than lots of cores, so a frequency-enhanced Core i7 would be a better choice if modelling is the primary function for the workstation.

On the other hand, whether the AMD FirePro W8100 or the NVIDIA Quadro K5000 is the best graphics choice depends on the applications you run, as both cost around the same.

Either way, at £5508.75 including VAT, this is also a hugely expensive workstation. The processor on its own makes up about £1,500 of that, and the AMD FirePro W8100 graphics a similar amount. Even taking into account the premium motherboard and sizeable complement of RAM, you are still paying a fair bit for the brilliant bespoke chassis design and high-end features such as the hot-swap power supply and drive bays.

We would also recommend buying this system with a secondary hard disk for data, although this won't make an enormous difference to the overall price. As a workstation where rendering is the primary need, but modelling still needs to be capable, this is a high quality system, although not a cheap one.

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Pros:

• Incredible rendering performance.
• Good modelling performance.
• Innovative chassis design.
• Excellent build quality.

Cons:

• Expensive.
• Best specified with secondary hard disk.
• Frequency-enhanced Core i7 better for modelling.

Kitguru says: The Armari Magnetar M16E-AW1200-GPU provides immense rendering capabilities and good modelling, but it's expensive.

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