Yeah those prices are to be expected.
To those upset by motherboard prices, keep in mind the first round of X99 had motherboards like the EVGA X99 Classified that was around 400 new. That was with a ton less connectivity. The enthusiast market was never cheap, was not even ment to be.
Yeah. And itās worth keeping in mind that while these boards are expensive theyāre also very full-featured. Even on the comparatively ālow endā X399 Taichi the only feature I can see that itās missing is 10 Gb/s ethernet. Which in all honesty I really donāt needā¦
On the other hand I donāt see whatās so special about the Asus ROG Zenith Extreme to justify that price tag. Itās significantly more than any of the others.
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The ROG boards usually have outstanding electrical properties like high-quality VRMs and very advanced UEFI options. Itās a breeze to overclock your CPU on them while there is also the way of doing an automatic OC if you are lazy.
Depending on how good Threadripper is overclocking this may or may not be needed for a personal machine but ROG is a nice enthusiast platform especially for exotic stuff like LN2 cooling.
My ROG motherboard (Intel platform however) ended up having good IOMMU support if you are interested in virtualization and PCI-passthrough.
I love to see some motherboards that have up to 8 pcie slots !!!
I have a really neat idea for a home server buildā¦ but it would need 6-8 pcie slots
Iām probably one of the few people that would use a 1900X. I like the lanes and the extended tech added on to what ryzen already provided. However, I donāt need the 50 billion cores and threads.
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Since I have to RMA my 1700 I was even more tempted but putting a TR in a rack case seems like a dumb ideaā¦ So Iām going the other way to 1600X to get slightly better clocks on slightly less cores for slightly less noise (hopefully).
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I havenāt seen much variance in the possible clock speeds between 6- and 8-core parts yet. Even some of the X-variants donāt seem to hit their XFR speeds on all cores. My 1700X maxes out at 3.95GHz at 1.375v, and Iāve seen a few 1700ās at 4GHz.
I was running mine at 3.8GHz and all was fine but as I said ā¦ rack case now. Right next to my desk. Two less cores should produce a bit less heat which means I donāt have to ramp up the fans. Donāt have lots of airflow available there. Hence leafblower Vega actually making sense. (running the low TDP bios)
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I see the 1900X catchs a bit a flack but not every workstation needs CPU horsepower. Maybe lots of IO and all the PCI lanes is attractive. Add in the expensive MB for access to that PCI lane access a cheap 8 core CPU may make a lot of sense.
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I believe this is why Intel has received so much crap for the artificial segmentation and the KabyLake-X parts. There is virtually no benefit to them, the PCIe lanes are not there, the platform is expensive with no real added performance. At least TR1900X has a use-case with all its extra I/O.
I think that the Kabylake X chips have been released as place fillers so that the Intel can start selling Coffee Lake mainstream and Coffee Lake X HEDT cpus at the same time without having the appearance of a skipped generation of HEDT CPUs.
I also donāt think the 28 vs 44 PCIe lanes is an artificial segmentation. It is because of a limitation of the architecture that Intel has moved to.
The new Skylake-X CPUs are being built in a grid layout as opposed to the older Ring design. The CPUs with up to 8 cores I think are built on a 4x4 grid and the 10 core and above CPUs are being built on a 6x6 grid. The PCIe parts of the die occupy one edge of the square grid. Two of the grids are dual channel memory controllers and the rest are either allocated to the CPU cores or are disabled. Designing in disabled grid spaces would help with yields and I am guessing temperatures.
Each of the grids for PCIe can host x8 Pcie lanes. the 4x4 grid allows for a maximum of 32 lanes. 4 of the lanes are allocated to DMI/chipset leaving 28 Lanes remaining to the motherboard slots. The Layout for the i7 Skylake X chips being something like this with P for Pcie, C for Core, B for Blank and M for memory controller
P P P P
C B C M
M C B C
C C C C
The i9 branded chips are built on a die with I think, a 6x6 grid. The 6 Grid spaces for IO give them the possibility to do 48 PCIe lanes with 4 going to DMI/chipset and the remaining 44 available for the user.
I think that the i9 chips are something like this for the 18 core variant. Obviously add more Blank grid spaces for the lesser cored versions. Spreading the blank grids helps spread the heat load over a wider area of silicon
P P P P P P
C C B C B C
M B C B C C
C B C B C M
C C B C B C
C B C C B C
No.
The 6-10 core CPUs all use the same die. An 8 core Skylake-X is the same as the 10 core. It just has two dies fused off. There really is no reason why the 8 or even 6 core parts couldnāt have 44 lanes (which AFAIK is also an artificial limitation as well with some parts having a few more but donāt quote me on that). Itās market segmentation.
yes, all HEDT are the same DIE the new āXtremeā lineup are based up on Xeons with overclock to the roof, that why they have an issue with thermals, those cpu are not designed for the Clocks/Voltage
The problem with thermals largely comes down to poor heat transfer from the die to the IHS due to Intelās Thermal Mayonnaise they use. The voltages to get pretty crazy OCs are actually relatively low
Well thats the issue on the Mainstream CPUs, the HEDT are a rushed marketing choice from the AMD Zen release, they responded by using E5 Xeons out of spec, i can assure that when we get those I9 Extreme on the wild we will see Delids and the Die will be the same as the E5 Xeons, i can almost warrantee that.
Xeons usually have low clocks and low voltage, but the arquitecture can support higher clocks with higher voltage but with the efficiency being thrown out of the window, thats what happened on the HEDT this generation,
It is a typical Intel surcharge. You pay 10% more for a K part, just an unlock surcharge. For M.2 RAID, yet another surcharge.
You now pay a PCIe surcharge.
lol I guess the rumors about the 12+ core parts possibly being soldered is ded.
Those temps gonna be nasty if they didnāt fix the paste.
Iām convinced Intel is full of dumb asses at this point even the mainstream parts are starting to have temp issues. More power to AMD.
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