Scan 3XS Evolve Studio Pro
Equally at home in gaming and (most) 3D content creation tasks, this is an ideal jack of both trades
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Scan’s 3XS Evolve Studio Pro is a powerful beast that looks stunning
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PRICE
£4,167 (£5,000 inc VAT)
from tinyurl.com/369scan
Regular desktop processors are now so good that you don’t necessarily need a workstation-focused CPU for professional creative work. This is particularly true if you want to game on the same system. For those who fit this category, AMD reckons it has a processor that will meet your needs perfectly: the Ryzen 9 with 3D V-Cache. We put the latest version through its paces in a system from British manufacturer Scan.
AMD’s 3D V-Cache technology stacks additional layers of L3 cache on top of the CPU. This significantly increases capacity, without making the chip package bigger. The 3D versions of AMD Ryzen 9 processors have twice as much L3 cache as their non-3D equivalents. There’s a 3D version of the Ryzen 7 as well, which has three times as much L3 cache as other Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 CPUs. This extra cache can provide considerable performance benefits for certain applications, including gaming and some (but not all, as we shall see) creative tasks.
The Ryzen 9 9950X3D in our test system has 128MB of L3 cache, compared to the 9950X’s 64MB. Otherwise, it has almost identical specifications to the non-3D version, with 16 cores all capable of running two threads for a total of 32 virtual cores. The base clock is 4.3GHz with a superb 5.7GHz top boost, which leads to a 170W thermal design power (TDP). So, this is a relatively power-hungry CPU.