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The best professional workstations for any budget

Modelling, rendering and number-crunching - these meaty machines will do it all

9 Jun 2020

After an extended period of unchallenged Intel dominance, recent years have seen successively more pugnacious possibilities from AMD. We’re now on the third generation of Ryzen and Ryzen Threadripper, and with each iteration the maximum core count has doubled. This month, we see the arrival of a single-socket workstation with a whopping 64 cores, in the form of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X

Although the top price in this roundup is £8,000 inc VAT, most manufacturers tend to plump for the more versatile 3970X with 32 cores. And for good reason, as this is a hugely capable CPU. The lower-end price of the machines in this list is around £3,000 inc VAT, which is still a decent amount of money for a powerful workstation.

AMD’s resurgence has now been so forceful that it’s now comparatively rare to see Intel-based workstations, even at the lower price. You’ll need to read on to see the detail of how they fare against the AMD alternatives, but we’re sure you’ll be as surprised as we are at the difference that a couple of years of concerted technological develop have made.

In particular, you can now enjoy 16 cores for £3,000 inc VAT or less, and if you opt for 32 cores you’ll get even better modelling ability and the processing power of a dedicated render node. So this is a great time to buy a workstation: it seems you truly can have it all in one system.