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While we are impressed by the awesome over-the-top nature of PC Specialist Sentinel, it will be immediately clear this workstation has a very specific market.
In addition to massive CPU performance you also want huge memory bandwidth and are happy to run a workstation with high power requirements. Threadripper Pro has a TDP of 280W, just like Threadripper, where EPYC typically operates in the range of 155W-170W for the CPU. During our testing we saw Sentinel drawing 410W at the wall socket in Blender and Cinebench, while a combined CPU and GPU workload in AIDA64 required 780W. Clearly power draw should be of no consequence to you.
It should also be obvious the £5,200 ticket price is just the starting point.
For one thing this is cheaper than buying the components separately and for another you will doubtless be packing in extra storage, hooking up high end displays and will be paying a fortune for your software licenses. We are confident you will barely notice the £5k expenditure from your petty cash but will enjoy the revenue that rolls in week after week.
All you have to do is decide whether or not quad channel DDR4 imposes a restriction on you and whether you regularly bump up against the limitations of 64-lanes of PCIe Gen 4. If so, PC Specialist Sentinel has the answer to your very rare problem.
You can buy the PC Specialist Sentinel Threadripper Pro for £5,199 HERE.
Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.
Pros:
- 8-channel DDR4 delivers huge bandwidth.
- 32-cores of CPU performance.
- Massive amounts of I/O and PCIe Gen 4.
- Plenty of scope for expanding storage and graphics.
- Total system price is cheaper than buying the parts individually.
Cons:
- DDR4-3200MHz ECC should be the base specification.
- We would prefer a Titanium or Platinum rated power supply.
- Zen 2 Threadripper is surely due an update to Zen 3 soon.
- The orientation of the Noctua cooler looks peculiar.
- Surely they could have added a few extra case fans.
KitGuru says: Threadripper Pro brings serious workstation performance to the mainstream market, however PC Specialist Sentinel deserves some tweaks and improvements.
