This was my thought too reading through this. TRX40 is probably for the lower core count “home gamer” setups where TRX80 will be higher count and ability but probably will RGB festooned, and WRX80 for people who actually want to do no nonsense work.
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Yeah pricy TRX40 boards is going to be expected.
It’s pretty unfortunate that AMD is following Intel’s strategy now days.
I mean its likely that HEDT is going to that expensive in the future,
that it will be pretty much out of reach for many people.
A reasonable TRX40 board + 3970X and Quadkit memory will likely be close to $2K.
Which is kinda disappointing if you ask me.
But yeah TRX40 boards are going to be expensive, because of the pci-e 4 situation.
And of course the upgraded vrm needs.
I’m kinda curious how the new gen Threadripper cpu’s are going to perform,
compared to the previous gen 2000 series.
To see if that is even going to be worth it.
However given the fact that the 3970X is starting as a 24 core.
there will likely not much material to test against other then the 2970X.
Which will leave me with a few thoughts here.
Either the raw performance difference between this gen and previous gen TR isn’t going,
to be that significant.
But yeah that is a matter of testing.
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Yes and no they are at least giving us major updates/upgrades frequently and not just charging tons for the same old dribble
I dont know about that, more pcie lanes and gen 4 = huge win for people who actually need TR also core all sharing memory access. There are a lot of major upgrades that will probably give a pretty decent bump in performance.
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Yeah i’m kinda curious to see the performance gains testing the 2970X vs the 3970X.
To see what the raw cpu performance differences are going to be.
Of course pci-e gen4 will have it’s benefits that is of course obvious.
But yeah like i said TRX40 doesn’t offer an entry level option anymore.
Which is kinda understandable from AMD’s perspective with the Ryzen.
But disappointing for us consumers.
Because some people would like to have more expand ability,
but don’t necessarily want to buy into that massive expensive TRX40 platform.
Unless board prices are going to suprise me.
But like i said i kinda think that even the entry level TRX40 boards will likely be $600 +…
I honestly think they will release a 16 core later in the life cycle (prob 6-9 months after release)
If you’re rich enough to buy a 32+ core Threadripper 3, I don’t think you should have any problem buying a new mobo. Otherwise you have a bigger problem at hand. AMD has given compatibility where it really is needed (with AM4).
This is an uneducated guess but it could be something to do with power delivery or board quality or something. New Threadrippers have a TDP starting at 280W, while the 2990WX was rated at 250W. Maybe not all X399 mobos are good enough to support all Threadripper 3 cpus?
There must be a certain jump from TR2 to TR3, as even Epyc motherboards need a revision to support 7002. I guess it’s the cost of the pursuit of performance.
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Robert said they’ll keep selling tr2 as a tier below tr3 instead of doing entry level tr3 cpus.
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Saw that, That means they want to run out of those chips and not sell at a crazy discount, hence my hopes of 6-9 months (look at 1920x pricing $200, while they probably are still making pennies off that why cut your own throat when there are mobos and cpus that are still in stock. AMD has issue liquidating things once new stuff comes out, so why drop things that will hurt other sales)
A lot of people who get TR CPUs do it for I/O. For example to use as home virtualization hosts. And as such I’d expect from those motherboards to support basic features used by virtualization hosts - like pci-e bifurcation to support pci-e risers, SR-IOV for reasonable network virtualization, ECC RAM, preferably either RS232 or IPMI to allow headless operation, decent IOMMU mappings and good storage options (without bullcrap like disabling SATA ports and pci-e slots if you use more than one M.2 SSD). Please note that ASRock x399 Fatal1ty mentioned by me earlier had all of those.
I’d honestly like to see TRX40 board similar to this one:
With 7 full length pcie slots. Because seriously - is there ANYONE who realistically used more than 2 NVME SSDs? Okay I can understand 2 NVME for RAID0/1 + U.2 for Optane 905P but boards with like 4x NVME are imho just bragging with meaningless numbers. If they’d leave normal pci-e x4 slots you could at least get actual pci-e SSD or SATA/SAS controller to compensate for those ridiculous SATA ports cuts. Most of pro grade pci-e cards are single slot - 40G network cards, IB cards, eSAS/FC controllers, pci-e SSDs, many workstation GPUs like Quadro RTX 4000, soundcards, accelerator cards, external pci-e bridges etc.
Yeah ASUS workstation motherboars line usually offers nice boards but there was no workstation boards in ASUS lineup for x399 so I’m not sure if I’d expect it to change with TRX40.
That makes no sense from a security standpoint as the older silicon isn’t hardware mitigated for the newer Spectre variants. Only Cascade Lake-X would be that if you want hardware mitigations and good IPC…
I have 3 nvme drives but yeah pcie to m.2 adapters and the biforcation cards are a thing
Well there always will be edge cases but then again you could buy M.2 pci-e x16/x8 card and get total of 4 or 6 M.2 slots even with only two M.2 on board (that said x399 Fatal1ty did have 3 NVME, one being U.2 combo and I totally dig this config). It’s easier to buy M.2 card for 4 NVME drives tgan to buy M.2 -> pci-e x4 adapters plus risers to convert those slots back to pci-e x4.
Still we don’t need ALL available motherboards to basically have nearly identical pci-e & NVME config. I’m all for variety. Currently available mobos are all copy-paste. 3 or 4 full length pci-e and 3 or 4 NVME. I’m not saying all designs should be exotic. But at least one. Currently they’re all the same and they’re all pretty meh.
It’s like looking at blower style reference GPUs which have different colors, a bit different shape but all in all they’re all the same. And the most idiotic move is MSI adding addon 10G card. Thanks, because I totally need to waste even more pci-e slots just because you didn’t find it appropriate to put 10G onboard… Jesus! what logic is that?! What the actual hell!
I feel like you are out of touch with the actual people who use these systems. The small edge group of people here are not the average users, I am sure the vendors know what’s best for the most of their userbase / target audience.
You are still talking.like TRX40 is all that there will be. There is still TRX80 and WRX80 the latter of which sounds like it will be in the segment you want.
No need to get annoyed by early offerings.
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That is definitelly an issue yes.
When it comes to x399 and the 250w tdp cpu’s like the 2970x 2990WX,
there are basically only two x399 boards that are really designed for those cpu´s.
And those are the Msi X399 MEG and the Asus X399 Zenith Extreme Alpha.
Those two particular boards had a vrm upgrade to support those two specific cpu´s.
All the other X399 gen1 boards are more geared towards the 180W tdp chips,
which are 2920X and 2950X.
The Msi x399 Gaming pro Carbon AC has pretty much the best vrm of the first gen boards.
This particular board has a 5 phase doubled to 10 phases for vcore.
And IR3555 powerstages.
So that particular gen1 board should be capable as well.
But all the other gen1 boards will run pretty warm with a 250W tdp cpu.
Because most of them are all 8 phase boards.
And i believe two are even 6 phase boards,
like the Asrock X399 phantom6 or whatever that thing is called. 
So yeah one of the reasons for a new TRX40 platform,
will definitelly have something to do with the power requirements.
Also the complexity of pci-e4 will also be a reason as well.
Well honnestly i think it kinda depends on what you expect from an HEDT platform.
I think that HEDT like Threadripper is mainly geared towards,
the content creators etc.
I mean content creators generally don’t really care about virtualization stuff etc.
So i could imagin that on first release there might be less attention payed to things like that.
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will the 32 core threadripper 3 beat the 28 core xeon enthusiast cpu ? a mean tr3 only real competitor is the 28 core zeon right
Depends what you do. AMD have apparently said it will beat the consumer version of that Xeon, the 9980xe, by up to 90%. So it will for some things and won’t for others.
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you mean W-3175X right