VerTecX21 reveals Project: Tritonis

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Cork, Ireland. 09 Feb 2022. VerTecX21 announced today that research and design has completed on Project: Tritonis with the aim to replace primary system Sicarius later this month.

Speaking at a virtual press conference due to Covid-19 restrictions, VertecX21 Director Ciarán Creedon revealed that the project entered the logistics phase on Feb 6th and VerTecX21 has also completed the purchasing process for all components. "It is past time for some new tech!" Mr. Creedon said to rapturous applause which had been pre-recorded and played at an appropriate pause. "Sicarius has been in operation as the Primary System for almost six and a half years, two years longer than Maxximus was in the role, and it's only now that we feel that we were able to address the issue."

The Sicarius' replacement project was originally expected to complete it's research and design phase back in June 2021 but the commissioning was "delayed significantly due to the crisis," explained Creedon, referring to the silicon semi-conducter manufacturing and supply crisis which dominated tech headlines in 2021 and according to Creedon, "prohibited engineers to construct new systems economically." The rescheduling of the project however seems somewhat fortuitous as VerTecX21 has leveraged the delay to now incorporate Intel's 12th Generation platform into Project: Tritonis. The final design includes the Intel Alder Lake Core i7 processor on a Z690 chipset with 32GB of DDR5 RAM, 3TB of PCIe Gen 4 SSD storage and a NVIDIA Ampere GeForce RTX 30 series GPU.

Creedon also revealed some special features about the new system including that Tritonis will be the first VerTecx21 system to no longer use mechanical hard drives internally. "HDDs are still the backbone of storage and will be for many years to come, but for our long term yet easily accessible external storage. For our everyday and short term use we will begin to only to use SSDs beginning with the Tritonis system," explained Creedon. The new system will also be the first to have 20Gbps USB and 2.5GHz Ethernet capability "with an eye towards a prospective upgrade to VerTecXneT network connectivity," added Creedon.

As for the project nomenclature, in Greek mythology, Tritonis is the goddess-nymph of the salt-water lake Tritonis in Libya, North Africa. Mr. Creedon did not answer questions at the conference but VerTecX21 issued responses to questions submitted online during the event and provided additional pertinent information on Project: Tritonis.

Please find additional information about Project: Tritonis by following this link.

Q: Sicarius was built with a NVIDIA GeForce 980Ti the flagship GPU at the time; the current NVIDIA flagship is the RTX3080Ti but Tritonis is not designed with this model in the specification, why?

A: The GPU market suffered significantly from the silicon chip crisis. Demand increased exponentially, mainly due to cryptomining and supply could not be met. This led to a significant shortage of available GPUs in both NVIDIA and AMD product offerings. Additionally those GPUs that could be sourced were - and still are from some vendors - often priced at three times the manufacturers suggested retail price (MSRP). Supply has increased somewhat over the past couple of months to a point where we were able to source GPUs at all levels. Our designers settled on the GTX3070Ti @ €1200 approx as the most logical option when compared with the €1700 GTX3080 or even the €2300 GTX3080Ti. This is because we believe it delivers the most bang for the buck. And at twice the MSRP the buck isn't going as far as it sohuld. Furthermore the savings (if we can use the term validly) at current prices can perhaps be used to upgrade Tritonis' GPU in approximately 12 to 18 months from now to remain current. This practice worked very well for Maxximus in 2010 and most systems that preceded that.

Q: How far was the planning of Sicarius' replacement back in June 2021 before it was halted and what were the significant changes between then and now?

A: We did enough research to be seriously considering our first ever AMD-based system to be Ryzen 7 on an X570 for Project: Tritonis. Specifically the Ryzen 7 5800x demonstrated the sort of numbers we were looking for. It was clear that AMD was significantly ahead of Intel's 10th Generation, but the 11th Gen i7 11700K released earlier in 2021 on a Z590 board would have likely been the platform of the eventual design when cost and availability were factored in. On the GPU side, we would never consider an AMDs offerings as we believe NVIDIA's technology to be superior and as we previously invested in a GSYNC monitor which we were not inclined to be changing at the time, NVIDIA was the only choice. We looked only at the RTX3070, RTX3080 and their respective Ti versions launched around that time as the RTX3060 was seen as not powerful enough and the RTX3090 was prohibitively expensive. Storage models had not been selected but likely to have been similar to what was selected for the current version of the project. No cooling or casing research decisions had been made.

Q: Performance of DDR5 RAM equipped systems show no significant increase over those with DDR4. How is the significant investment in a DDR5 platform justified against this fact?

A: While it is true to say that there is plenty of remaining life left in the DDR4 platform, it is an almost 8 year old technology and no longer the latest available standard. It is not VerTecX21's policy to invest in a technological standard of a previous released generation such as the 11th Generation Intel CPUs, RTX20 series GPUs or PCIe Gen 3 SSDs regardless of perceptible performance unless the new technology has significant known technological issues which prevent it from being superior.

Furthermore it is projected that Tritonis will serve a minimum of three years as Primary System and we believe that would be far too long a duration to be relying on DDR4 while in that role when a new standard exists and is readily available albeit expensive right now. If we were to instead build with DDR4 and upgrade Tritonis to DDR5 at a later time to take full advantage of performance gains, we would be forced to upgrade the motherboard as well which would likely incur a total cost in excess of our current investment unless 16GB modules of DDR5 were going to retail for approximately €50 each in 2024.

We acknowledge the cost of DDR5 RAM is indeed significantly higher than DDR4 right now and it offers no significant gains in over 90% of situations currently but VerTecX21 believes that percentage will soon drop and DDR5s superiority will become more evident as time goes on and not just in specific video editing use cases or in games like Assassins Creed: Valhalla which sees significant results with DDR5 over DDR4 today.

Q: Will Tritonis have RGB?

A: We do regret to inform you that Tritonis will in fact be equipped with some RGB effects. It must be noted however that these are not deliberately designed elements but 'features' built-in to individual components. Specifically the Motherboard, GPU and the CPU cooler are equipped with RGB, the latter which was acquired because it was in fact significantly cheaper than it's non RGB counterpart. We will of course actively endeavour to prevent Tritonis' monolithic black case from becoming some sort of 'high tech nightclub from the future'.