Yoyotech is a somewhat unfamiliar name in the workstation market, although the company has been supplying a professional range for a few years now. The Renatus Pro M3, however, is a brand new line. It combines a familiar set of components with one or two enhancements that could win it favour in the larger corporate world.
The first familiar component is an Intel Core i7 processor, which has become increasingly popular in workstations. The six-core 5930K is a good balance of clock frequency and multi-core power, and Yoyotech has set it permanently to 4.2GHz, with NZXT Kraken X61 water cooling to keep temperatures at bay. The increased frequency over the stock 3.5GHz is covered by the three-year return-to-base warranty, with the first year parts and labour, and the other two labour only, although 30 days of collect-and-return have been thrown in at the beginning.
The processor has been partnered with a healthy 32GB of 2,133MHz DDR4 memory, although Yoyotech has strangely supplied this as eight DIMMs, so there are no slots free for upgrade left on the motherboard. Graphics takes the shape of the now-familiar Nvidia Quadro M4000. This high-end card sports a hefty 1,664 CUDA cores and an equally impressive 8GB of GDDR5 memory, making it great for handling large texture sets, and with plenty of GPU grunt available.
Storage takes the usual form of a solid state disk for operating system and main applications, plus a conventional hard disk for general data. The SSD in question is a Samsung SM951 NVMe unit, attached using the M.2 PCI Express slot. This is hugely quick, even compared to a SATA-connected SSD, and will storm through system booting and software loading, although its capacity is merely adequate. Similarly adequate is the 1TB 7,200rpm hard disk, although this is from Seagate's Constellation ES.3 range, so is rated for years of all-day operation without failure, which will be reassuring for a professional.
Another reassuring inclusion for the professional is the 750W Thermaltake SMART DPS G Gold PSU, which is connected to a USB port so the power supplied to each voltage rail can be monitored and recorded – both locally on the system itself and across the network. This allows you, or your IT manager, to keep a very close watch on which components are making the biggest dent in your electricity bill.
The Renatus Pro M3's six-core processor gives a good showing with Maxon Cinebench R15's render test, achieving 1,221. More cores is best here, and we've seen dual-socket systems go way beyond this level, but the score is good for a single socket. The Cinebench R15 OpenGL result of 166.2 is decent, and there are some very credible scores in SPECviewperf 12 too. The maya-04 result of 68.38 is very good, and 116.78 in sw-03 is excellent, but overall the system performs as we would expect from a workstation equipped with Nvidia Quadro M4000 graphics.
Costing £2,727.14 inc VAT, the Yoyotech Renatus Pro M3 is a little on the pricey side. But it's extremely well put together, with enterprise-grade power supply monitoring and secondary storage. It also offers dependable performance both for rendering and modelling, although the latter will be its particular forte.
This article originally appeared in 3D World magazine issue 207; buy it here.
