I have often noticed that Wendell uses the Asrock wrx80 for anything Threadripper pro. The main question i have is what is the exact reasons for that? I currently have the Asus wrx80 and to me, Asus is a jack of all trades, master of none and find their products are no thrills no spills, they get the job done. I had an Asus laptop, currently got an Asus tablet and now have the wrx80 with a second hand ASUS gt 970 gpu.
Furthermore, I was a little sceptical of getting this Asus board due to the fact my tablet does support Linux due to drivers, but supports Windows 11, even though its a Skylake cpu. My fear was that this board would not support unraid, but aside from some bumps along the way, the motherboard works fine.
When I first stepped into unraid, I had an as rock x299 mini ITx and both boards seamed to have issues, which resulted in my selling off the parts and scrapping the project until times were more stable.
I know there has been a review of the asus board and seams to have got good review by wendell, but has not seen any action after that.
I know the case of it aint broke dont fix, but I am mearly curious of what does the asrock board offer apart from thunderbolt and vga directly on the io.
Should I stick with jack of all trades or switch to motherboard and gpu specialist Asrock?
What are people’s thoughts?
Or is it literally a case of if it works, it works and stop wasting time over something daft like this?
I don’t know all the details of the wrx80, but it’s my opinion that if it does all the things you want it to do today, then don’t change it. Your wallet, your time, and the environment will thank you.
I wouldn’t even worry about what it might not be able to do in the future. If you have hardware in hand today, then I would cross the upgrade bridge when you get to it later. If you don’t have a need for thunderbolt today, then I wouldn’t change anything either.
He’s probably just getting lots of review samples from them because he tends to review them favourably, and so when he needs a motherboard for some build, he just happens to have a pile of ASROCK in the closet. The main reason I’d argue for them is that, in consumer platforms, they support ECC. But I’ve also read that they sometimes release updates that remove the ECC support, so I wouldn’t call them ideal either. Their IO is usually pretty lousy too. In a high-end product, I’m not sure any brand is better than another, just look at the feature list and pick what appeals to you the most. And obviously all Threadripper boards support registered ECC, so ECC UDIMM support is basically irrelevant.