CREATIVE WORKSTATIONS

Intel and AMD both offer compelling CPU choices for workstations, giving us ten machines with the widest variety of specifications we've seen for years

- JAMES MORRIS

In last year's workstation Labs (see issue 336, p74), Intel staged a comeback, at least at the lower end of the price range. The good news is that, 12 months later, there's a new generation of Intel Core i9 CPUs that are still competitive against a new generation of AMD Ryzen processors. But the high end is back to being dominated by AMD, now that the Ryzen Threadripper Pro is generally available.

This year, we stuck with the same price points of £4,500 inc VAT for the lower end and £10,000 for the higher end. While the lower figure is still realistic for a very capable general workstation, the higher one was more problematic. Inflation has meant that most manufacturers have had to make compromises rather than deliver the best of every component at this price.

The result has been many different choices and combinations, giving us the biggest variety that we've seen in this category for many years. Instead of essentially the same CPU and GPU choices for the two different prices, with only the quality of implementation to separate them, almost every system this month has a different balance of these two key components. There's even a promising new AMD Radeon Pro graphics card in attendance.