A superb all-rounder, with great graphics acceleration, very fast rendering and plenty of storage
Zircon is a gemstone not to be confused with the synthetically produced cubic zirconia. Instead, it’s a naturally occurring gold-hewed mineral that comes in a variety of shades. PCSpecialist clearly considers its high-end entry to be a bit of a gem and it’s certainly packed with cutting-edge components.
Despite the return of the non-Pro AMD Ryzen Threadripper, PCSpecialist opted not to go with this variant for the Zircon Extreme workstation. Instead, it uses the 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7975X. This offers 64 threads and runs at the same frequencies as the non-Pro version – a base 4GHz with 5.3GHz boost. However, the Pro processor supports eight-channel memory and has 128 PCI Express 5 lanes, so can offer higher memory bandwidth while supporting many more high-speed peripherals than the vanilla Threadripper.
Strangely, however, although PCSpecialist has included a healthy total of 256GB DDR5 RAM memory running at 4,800MHz, this is supplied as four 64GB DIMMs rather than eight 32GB ones. This means that you can’t take advantage of the extra bandwidth from the eight-channel memory capability unless you add another four DIMMs. On the plus side, while we don’t envisage 256GB feeling like too little during the lifetime of this system, the Asus Pro WS WRX90E Sage SE motherboard has four DIMM slots free for upgrade and seven PCI Express 5 x16 slots, although one of these only operates in x8 speed mode.
