Armari Magnetar M16R7-1300G3

Shows what the Ryzen 7000 series has to offer creatives: phenomenal performance in every CPU-related task

- JAMES MORRIS 

PRICE £4,595 (£5,514 inc VAT) from armari.com

W e are entering another exciting phase for PC processors, particularly if you're a content creator. While the mid-range pendulum swung back to Intel in our recent workstations Labs (see issue 336, p74), AMD's Ryzen 7000 series promises huge potential for content creation. Here, I put it through its paces in Armari's Magnetar M16R7-1300G3.

Armari has, of course, opted for the top Ryzen 97950X for its system.

Unlike the Intel Core i9-12900K chips that proved so popular in the Labs, the Ryzen 9 has 16 full-speed cores rather than eight, alongside eight low-power ones. And the 7950X provides a base clock of 4.5GHz across all its cores, with an incredible maximum Boost frequency of 5.7GHz, so it should hurtle through any task with a multithreaded bias.

The Ryzen 7000 series is AMD's first to support DDR5, with Armari providing a generous 64GB complement of 5,600MHz Corsair Vengeance Black DDR5 as two 32GB DIMMs. This runs at 4,800MHz on the system, but enables the processor's dual-channel memory capability. It also leaves two DIMM slots free on the Asus X670E ProArt-Creator WiFi motherboard, to make an upgrade to 128GB possible - but this will drop the DIMM operating speed to 3,600MHz.