AMD Threadripper Motherboards are Insane: TRX50 & WRX90 Board Round-Up

[Music] there are a lot of very large thread rer motherboards that got revealed in the past couple of weeks these align with the tx50 and W X90 chipsets that are coming out for the upcoming AMD threader 7000 launch which is due out later in November we recently covered amd's announcement including both the pro and non-pro HDT CPUs in a standalone News videos check that out if you missed it but now we have various boards to do an overview of so we're basically going through the spec listings and through the photos of a ASRock gigabyte and super micro motherboards for the threader platform MSI sadly not present for this one we'll talk about that as well before that this video is brought to you by thermal Grizzly and the cryos sheet graphine pads these cryos sheets are molecularly stacked in the Zess to encourage vertical direct thermal transfer from the IHS to the cooler cryo sheet pads are made to be easily applicable for a thermal interface and completely avoid paste dry out because it's not paste it makes them particularly useful for lawn service life systems with minimal maintenance they come in multiple sizes for suitability on the most common laptops and desktop CPUs and you can learn more at the thermal Grizzly cry sheets at the link in the description below first up amd's two thread Ripper platforms have a couple of variations in compatibility so for pro and non-pro known as HDT for the latter uh there's a mix where the WX 90 platform for pro thread rer CPUs will only support thread Ripper Pro chip whereas the tx50 Enthusiast HDT platform will support both Pro and HDT or nonpr CPUs we'd recommend sticking to the pro platform for pro CPUs in most cases but technically you could run them in tx50 and again this content will be a preliminary flyover of all the different boards we don't have even really any pricing yet uh so we'll be talking about that separately as we get it but for now we have boards and specs and some of them look pretty crazy actually the craziest one was an ATX form factor one as in it was it was the least physically imposing and impressive but the most impressive for fitting in a normal case first up is MSI MSI has nothing we asked uh we sent them an email they are totally sitting this launch out they haven't announced any official thread for 7,000 support at the time of writing and hosting this and MSI previously supported thread for 3,000 with the Creator TX 40 and one other board uh and we reached out to MSI for further comment the company responded with simply quote we don't have any plans for storm Peak and will not have tx50 or WR rx90 motherboards it doesn't get any more straightforward than that so on to the next one first up from an actually participating board partner is Asus with the pro WS TRX 50- Sage WiFi it's a CB sized board with a doubled 18 phase vrm so they total that as 36 phases when counted that way and that's an 18x two plus 3 plus 4 plus 4 vrm design the new thread Ripper 7,000 CPUs all have a rated TDP of 350 wats so compared to the vrm capability here that's low the vrm is overkill but there's a few reasons for this one is marketing the other one is the board Partners want to make sure the vrm design is capable of not only pushing that much power but also staying cool under hours of sustained load like you'll have in a serious workstation the CPUs are also fully overclockable and likely will blow out the efficiency curve if they're overclocked heavily so the vrm will be helpful there as well plus efficiency is a good thing with this type of CPU and a better vrm will help provide that that's particularly true though if running at liquid nitrogen without a heat sink for breaking World Records their power connectors all over the board including some for a second power supply shown covered by black plugs in the photos in total there are four CPU 8 pins two 24 pins and two extra pcie power plugs on the right Edge near the chipset a Asus also throws in two CPU 8 Pin to pcie 8 Pin conversion cables for power supplies that don't have enough native CPU 8 pins the second power supply connection will help with overclocking so we're not sure if asus's plans to support redundancy of power supplies here but neither event it makes multi- power supply cases suddenly more interesting so even without redundancy if you're going to run two power supplies and you're not just doing it for exoc on top of a table taking 6 fet of table for one computer then something like lean Le series case suddenly there's value in that dual power supply support Where You Yank A Drive cage and replace it with a power supply cage instead uh and you'll have to check each each different case to make sure they still support that but something like that proves a useful option in a workstation build where you might just want two power supplies but you don't need two power supplies just to run the board you can run it with one back to the vrm the need to manage vrm heat output is evidenced by the massive heat sinks that surround three sides of of the enormous socket the flanking heat sinks that include fans are also for the vrm and other board components in the io area with ram oriented north and south of the socket we like that the upper vrm heat sink is actually thinned it doesn't have a bunch of decorative plates or massive chunks of aluminum without any Finning so this is good there are only four dim slots on this board meaning it's a one dim per Channel setup that's good for stability and speed but more restrictive for capacity Workstation setups that need a serious amount of memory will need to be equipped with the highest capacity ddr5 modules available Asus says that up to a terab of eccr dim ddr5 is supported but since there are only four slots here that would require using 256 GB sticks to hit now 256 GB sticks actually are a thing and these particular sticks cost $3,200 you could spend over 10 grand on one tab of RAM for this board depending on the spec and where where it's purchased now in between Wendell rebuilding our website and helping us launch it again Gamers access.net if you want to see the new revamped version of the site he noted that thread for 5000 who had had a bios bug for almost a year were only seven of eight dims would work uh and so that there's been some posts on their level one text forms about that so you'll want to check the QV for memory on these qvl often gets overlooked where it's the qualified vendor list each motherboard typically will maintain a qbl where they say these are the the kits we've tested on this board and are confirmed to be good for boards that get into high uh or relatively uncommon capacities at least for HDT you'll really want to look at the QV because uh you're you're more and more likely to end up in some Edge case they haven't tested for and it's not always a given that memory just works when you socket it into the board so make sure you check on that for thread rer the tier x50 Sage is also capable of ipmi Remote Management via asus's ipmi expansion cards it launched last year it's not quite as handy as having it built into the motherboard directly but it's good that it's possible the WX 90 board has it built in pcie connectivity is relatively generous it has three gen 5 slots and two gen 4 these are physically full length by6 slots but based on the photo the electrical wiring isn't by6 in all of them the second slot from the bottom appears to be limited to BU four based on the missing pins we're seeing again just from the photo storage options include 3 m.2 slots four SATA and One slim SAS connector with nvme support slim SAS is a connection standard from the server world that's capable of carrying SATA SAS and nvme just depending on how it's set up on the device side rear IO is an interesting mix on this board there are two USB 2 headers which is useful for input compatibility particularly for bios it has 6 10 GB USB type A ports and a single 20 GB type c port in order to get usb4 or you'd have to connect an addin card to an internal header networking is handled by 10 GB and 2.5 GB land ports and built-in Wi-Fi 7 Asus and its press release also announced its Pro WS wx9 e- Sage SE motherboard which has an even longer name than the last one so it's probably better that's normally how that works this is for the thread Ripper 7,000 Pro Line and in the press release they didn't include any photos but we got a couple of them from Asus this board is absolutely massive it's even more packed than the tx50 board Asus provided us with a table to distinguish the key changes and based on the press release the table and the images some of the defining features that are supposed to differentiate it from the tx50 board other than the CPUs themselves include a bump up to seven total pcie 5.0 slots at physical by6 length an additional fan to cool the m.2 devices in the chipset dual 10 GB Lan built-in ipmi and BMC and rear USB 4 next up is ASRock with the simply named azrock tx50 WS the first few things that jumped out at us for this board other than the tragic lack of additional x's and the lack of several numbers is the fact that this board has a lot of fans given that this is a workstation board there's normally more baked intolerance for noise and those small fans will bring with them some additional wine particularly at the top end of the RPM curve overall it has a more stripped down look as compared to the Asus board which is perfectly fine not every Board needs to be huge and slimming down should help with cost but the important thing is that it can hit the objectives without running wildly inefficient or having an overheating vrm nearly the entire back of the board is covered by a metal back plate that sinks heat via some thermal pads this can help it depends on the board in our experience it's less helpful than a GPU back plate is because the motherboard's back plate is sandwiched against the case and it has less ability for heat to be effectively removed from the system a GPU back plate has more exposure to front case fans so there's some more wicking potential there power delivery is handled by an 18 plus 3 plus 3phase design which as rock says is using 110 amp phases it's technically compatible with dual power supplies in the same way that every board is technically compatible with them by using an adapter cable that just wires up the signaling pins used to tell the second power supply when to turn on and off azrock also says this lowers the risk of fire great good there's no second 24 pin connector on the board that helps with size for sure it might help a little bit with cost but it does mean a Messier implementation the memory layout is the same it's one dim per Channel setup as we saw on the Asus board as rock specifically claims up to ddr5 7600 support and its spec page one of the biggest points to an htdt platform though is the much greater IO capability as compared to regular desktops that's reflected here the board is equipped with five physical by6 pcie slots with three of them on Gen 5 and two on Gen 4 the Gen 5 slots are wired to Run slots one and three at by 16 with slot four listed as buy eight in azrock Spec table slots two and five are Gen 4 supporting buy four and by8 modes storage up next first off it's handled by two m.2 slots but one of them is blazing and the other one is hyper naturally blazing is higher up in the hierarchy than hyper this is obvious of course it's almost as obvious as numbers too bad we don't have any for PCI Generations uh Ultra probably Falls somewhere within this hierarchy but really it's blazing that matters we think the names keep changing it also has four SATA two slim SAS and one MCI we had to look up what that last one is and we're glad we did because MCI apparently stands for mini cool Edge IO and no we're not joking that is the name it's another form factor designed to transmit pcie signals over a cable somewhat similar to oculink or u3 but the connector design should be capable of pcie 6.0 once it arrives rear iio is made up of six USB type A ports four at 10 GB and two at 5 GB there are two type c ports at 20 and one at 10 gbits per second two land ports one 10 GB and 2.5 GB Wi-Fi 6E and some basic audio connectivity it doesn't seem like USB 4 is anywhere on this one not even internally and it's not listed in their spec sheet ASRock also has the WRX 9ws Evo which sounds like a Subaru the ASRock press release shows off a little bit of its WRX 9d WS Evo motherboard for pro CPUs but there's no dedicated product page at the time of writing we do have one low reses photo to work with though it's clearly a larger board with eight dim slots for the thread of her Pro CPUs eight memory channels and an additional vrm cooling fan on the right side totaling five there's also seven physically fulllength pcie by6 slots but we're not sure of the electrical wiring Lan is upgraded to with dual 10 GB and an additional dedicated Management Port the board also appears to be wider gigabyte is up next so far they have only announced one board for thread over 7,000 at least at the time of filming this they'll probably have more but let's take a look at the one they have announced this one is the gigabyte tx50 aod it's definitely the most aesthetically focused so far with a silvery bare aluminum look across all the heat sinks and the rear IO cover it's not clear from the photos we have today whether there are any built-in heat sink fans but it doesn't look like it there aren't any perforations in the io cover either to suggest if one might be hiding there the board's spec page claims a 16 + 8 plus 4 4 phase vrm and if it turns out that there aren't going to be any fans included with this board for the vrm heat sink then fans mounted in the top of the case would help with cooling it it's not as fully finned though as it probably should be instead gigabyte is relying on larger blocks of aluminum the thermal tab for the board States presence of an 8 mm heat pipe through the vrm heat sink though to help move some of the heat around compared to the other boards the AER has less pcie connectivity for the boards we're looking at today it's cut down to only three full length slots that said gigabyte is really proud of its pcie UD slot X boasting 10x strength for graphics card fantastic we'll need that when the RTX 590 cinder block Edition comes out the aod has a lot of m.2 slots totally in four and contributing to the general feeling that this is the most desktop aligned thread reper 7000 board we've seen so far backing that up is the fact that it doesn't look like it has any Enterprise grade storage connectivity in the likes of slim SAS u3 or MC C iio or at least none that were listed on the product page at the time of writing it does however appear to have eight SATA ports on the right Edge rear IO includes both 10 GB and 2 and 1/2 GB ethernet there's also Wi-Fi 7 4 USB 3.2 Gen 2 Port 4 USB 3.2 gen 1 ports and two USB 4 type- C ports this plus the m.2 support position the board in an interesting place where it could be the best option for a user who needs to regularly transfer large fil onto and off of external storage an example might be a dedicated video transcode station or something where the user needs to dump the footage onto the system transcode it move it to another editing station of course there's more boards coming out that we haven't seen yet so maybe this will kind of evolve one last curious addition to the rear IO is a display port in the most immediately useful case we could think of would be if the user wants to run the USB 4 right below it as a display output for monitors that require a type-c input this is done by running a display port cable between the discrete GPU and the motherboard gigabyte hasn't published a manual at the time of writing so we're not able to confirm that this is the intended purpose but it's our best speculation right now finally we have super micro with the H with with the h13 sr- TF it's by far the board with the most uh Alpha numerically complex name and that makes it better but unon ically it's the most function focused thread Ripper board that we've looked at so far and in typical super micro fashion they are completely focused on that functionality the Aesthetics are secondary if you haven't heard of Super Micro uh perhaps you are mostly a sort of desktop gaming type system builder but super micro is prevalent in server and in highend builds uh where you might want that extra functionality ipmi stuff like that it's also notable for being the smallest board that's been announced at true ATX size since this is built to be more of a serious work motherboard it features dedicated landan for ipmi dual 10 GB Lan one com port and a VGA port and yes those are still useful fact we actually still use VGA ports for our server system for storage it's got four SATA pcie is listed as 2 pcci 5.0 by8 with the slot cut two pcie 5.0 by6 one pcie 4.0 by8 and mcio connector this board would be particularly useful in a server solution something like the first one that we built with wendle uh actually the second one as well where being able to remote into the server and monitor all the sensors uh not necessarily just within Linux but through its own interface that's a huge feature and a great value ad it's useful for home servers uh just as it is for sort of a small business type server which is what we're using so that's something that makes these types of boards particularly interesting and the smaller form factor is of course beneficial as well for case compatibility so that's it for the overview we're not sure how many of these we'll be looking at with the thread reper launch uh typically we try to run our CPU reviews on Asus boards just because we have a good understanding of the BIOS and where we can lock stuff down to keep like for like testing so we'll probably be trying to test on one of those boards for launch at least uh it's likely we'll work on getting a gigabyte one hopefully MSI comes to the party if they do we'll take a look at one of those but either way the options we've covered here have enough differences between them where users who have a specific idea or concept for their thread rer build probably already know which one they're pointed towards things like IO one of the key differentiating factors here and if you need assistance and trying to figure out which board to buy first of all wait for them to launch so that people can use them and talk about them but secondly probably the number one thing you're looking at other than does it clear the basis for a decent vrm is going to be the io support and specifically what you need for your build and features like ipmi if that's important to you but there aren't a lot of boards and they're all going to be relatively expensive it is exciting though to have this type of product back on the market cuz HT was kind of dead for a couple years pricing of course is a lot different from what it was in the first generation of thread Ripper and the second generation of thread Ripper although it's maybe closer to the thread Ripper 5,000 Pro stuff so pricing is higher than it used to be but in the very least it's nice to have that Enthusiast Market Market kind of coming back and giving some more options and we're excited to work with it because for our use cases as as a business a lot of times we can make use of those extra IO and and PCI L capabilities uh okay so that's going to be it for this one we will be working on reviews for thread Ripper as soon as we have it in we'll have them public hopefully around or just before the launch of the product hopefully we'll see and as always thanks for watching subscribe more go to store. 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Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 251,190

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, amd threadripper, amd threadripper 7000, amd threadripper 7980x, amd threadripper 7970x, amd threadripper 7960x, amd threadripper pro, asus trx50 sage, asrock trx50, gigabyte trx50, wrx90 motherboards, trx50 motherboards

Id: NTnVBIEPz1w

Length: 20min 13sec (1213 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 12 2023