I’m currently on an i3770k and after almost 10 years on it I have decided to move onto a 5950x. I use Ubuntu and it seems like asrock plays nice with it (temp sensors). I have narrowed my choice in mobo to the x570 Creator and the Taichi. I seems like the Creator is mostly hit and miss regarding Thunderbolt support, and the Taichi works fine using the GC Titan Ridge card, however most posts are from '19 or early '20. I’m mostly interested in Thunderbolt for data transfer and device connection, not really on using it as DP. Does anyone have experience on it? Here’s my perspective and current thoughts:
Objective- Build a powerful system that serves me for the foreseeable future (no less than 6 years)
NVME- Taichi has the advantage, 3 slots for nvme, 2 after using the last pci-e. Creator has 2 and only one if Thunderbolt and the last pcie slot are used. Up until now I don’t even use nvme, might get one for my /home folder on ubuntu and keep the rest on sata. Could even get a pcie card for extra nvme storage.
LAN - Creator has the 10g Aquantia card
SATA- 4+4asmedia vs 8 on Taichi. Only use 5 Sata disks now, might move down do 3 sata and 1 nvme.
Thunderbolt - Creator has onboard Thunderbolt (albeit limited to 3 devices and 15w) Up until now only my monitor and my Mac laptop are TB capable, I don’t think I might need 6 device daisy chains in the near future, but that might some years into the future. The GC Titan Ridge seems super hard to get now, nothing on amazon and half of what shows on Newegg is flashed for Hackintosh, nothing at all in my country. Were those discontinued?
Since 1 pcie slot will be used by my gpu, if I get Thunderbolt through an add in card then that leaves me to decide between an extra nvme card or an extra network card to populate the remaining slot (although that is a moot point if onboard Thunderbolt on the Creator doesn’t work at all). On the other hand, if the Creator works as intended then that leaves me the option of both an extra nvme expansion card, and a network card (sfp+?), or even a SAS if I need it in the future.
I looked into the Taichi Razer Edition, however Wendell’s recent review showed that wireless and wired network interfaces don’t work in Linux.
Thanks for the link it seems like there’s a clear and detailed process to get the GC Titan Ridge fully working.
Where did you get the GC-Titan Ridge 2.0? Amazon hasn’t had it since february (at almost $250 through a 3rd party) and hasn’t sold directly since june last year. Most listings in Newegg and ebay show them flashed for use with Mac and cost over $170, many of them over $200.
It seems like the Taichi (standard edition) might be the perfect board for me regarding compatibility and working features, however the lack of availability of Titan Ridge cards (or extreme prices) make me think that the Creator might be the safer bet (if Thunderbolt works) to get all the features.
The Creator indeed has TB3 support onboard.
However i´m not fully sure how the native linux support is on that unfortunately.
I do believe that the Asrock X570 Creator board isn´t the most ideal board for virtualization with pci-e pass trough,
because of it’s iommu groupings.
But when you run Linux natively than that isn’t really that relevent.
Another board with onboard TB3 is the Gigabyte B550 Vision D.
But of course a B550 board could be a limitation in general.
This board only comes with dual 1Gbit intel nic’s.
No 10G Aquantia unfortunately.
Maybe @wendell could give you some advice in regards to,
to the Thunderbolt solutions and Linux support on both boards.
Because i believe he did review them both.
On a side note, “if” thunderbolt is trully important to you.
Then maybe you might also wanne look into intel´s rocket lake and Z590 boards.
Some of those boards come with TB4 onboard.
However the top of the line cpu the 11900K is only an 8 core.
And there for kinda expensive in comparison to AMD´s offerings.
Thank you all, you are truly awesome!
I’m not that interested in virtualization, mostly running native linux (as a daily workhorse) and some basic games on Windows once or twice a month.
I’m ready to jump the gun now that you told me about Intel certification and it working properly on Linux. I’ll be pairing it with an NH-D15 and will pay attention to case airflow.
Are there any reviews yet, what kind of performance or support could be expected under Linux? I currently have some kind of Asus P8Z77, and while it mostly works great I never managed to get my ethernet interface working from a cold boot, I always have to reboot after the first beep in order to just have the interface recognized (independent of OS used). What about temp sensors? (Nuvoton or something else?)
The x570 Creator went up a $100 half an hour before I tried to buy it, so I’m currently on hold waiting for it to go down again before buying it or getting something else.
I’m going to have a look at the ASUS ProArt B550-Creator as soon as it becomes available in Germany.
It seems its first shipment for the European distributors from Asia was on that ship that made a little stop in that canal so I don’t know exactly when they are going to pop up.
X570 seems the only AM4 ryzen candidate for these workloads.
It is the only am4 chipset to get 4x pcie 4 lanes (8 GB/s) of IO bandwidth to share among its more and better chipset ports.
The 4GB/s of other AM4 chipsets doesnt cut it for modern levels of IO.
Its odd that so few mention the option of an 8 lane gpu, when so few think 16 GPU lanes of pcie4 helps.
A 2x 8 pcie slot x570 rigged this way, has the extra IO to serve as a poor mans threadripper.
That’s kinda my thing, checking out stuff, hoping to find a technologically elegant solution, seemingly doing so and no one else seems to care when advertizing it as a solution for other people or finding strange bugs with them making them not sufficient again
For example everything that hangs off of an X570 chipset IO die should be able to get an individual IOMMU group since it’s the same thing as the one that handles the PCIe devices in a chiplet-based Zen 2/3 CPU.
Finally got my hands on an ASUS ProArt B550-CREATOR and of course there is some weirdness going on, probaby will create a dedicated thread for it after I’m certain I didn’t get a defective unit.
Something strangely shitty: In The UEFI you can only Disable Thunderbolt 4 or use it in “No Security” mode which would suck - other options like User Authentication are not present
