Gigabyte WRX80 Threadripper PRO - FINALLY Thunderbolt! - Motherboard Review

do you have any idea how long i've been waiting for this package to come i ordered this in march it's almost june but it's here we've got a lot to talk about all things threadripper pro this is the ga wrx80-su-8-ipmi this is the threadripper pro platform from gigabyte this is their i think their flagship board or at least this is the only board that they have right now it's desktop board but it's for threadripper pro figure pro of course is a big upgrade over regular threadripper and that you move from four to eight channels of memory and from 64 to 128 pcie lanes and you leave behind all things rgb but you still keep some pretty cool features like a high-end audio solution and you know a little bit more aesthetic than plain green printed circuit board let's take a close look at the features that this board offers just at first glance first we got our socket now this is turned in a different orientation than desktop sockets there is a reason for that and that has to do with routing the memory traces a little bit more easily and a couple of other parameters pretty much when you're running a processor like this you're locked into using a printed circuit board that's more layers than another circuit board the other reason is that typically these were used in servers and so the airflow from a server typically is front to back or possibly back to front depending on you know the whole hot aisle cold aisle and who architected your chassis and stuff like that so this layout actually does make a lot of sense because it's borrowed from the server platform that's been you know qualified in server land with server cpus because epic is just another name for threadripper pro but for the server chassis but threadripper pro does have some tweaks for tuning and speed and stuff like that in more of a workstation class so it's pretty awesome eight dimm slots eight memory channels one dim per channel it's uh it's like two terabytes of memory support if you can find dims with that capacity one terabyte right now we'll say officially official memory support don't quote me on that but one terabyte of memory support actually have 512 gigabytes to test with yeah 64 gigabytes per dimm that's a spicy meatball that's about 3 000 of memory right there it gives me it gives me a little bit of heart palpitations i know that wasn't last night's chicken wings so on this motherboard you won't find things like rgb as i mentioned or even overbuilt vrm this is designed for tdps of up to 280 watts and not one watt more we've got the primary vrm delivery system at the front edge of the board you know with the system on chip power delivery system at the back and and two pair for power delivery for the dimms we also got a four pin soc uart and a dip switch that is completely unmarked it's not in the manual it's not in the quick start guide it's not in any other stuff in the box which we'll get to because i really like what gigabyte is doing with their box bundle but yeah fun stuff we have the standard 24 pin power connector and a standard atx 12 volt connector this 8 pin connector is not a secondary atx 12-volt connector this is actually pci express power which supplies supplemental power to the pci express slots if you're going to run a lot of gpus well potentially they can consume up to 75 watts each through the bus this is where they get that power which is good that gigabyte has done that although it's a little odd that they didn't opt for the atx 12 volt standard which is four 12 volt wires on this connector this connector is three 12 volt wires and two grounds once percents so this is not quite as many watts through the 12 volt rail as this one this is a peak of 400 watts so again over built for 280 watt goals here but you know i digress we've got the two digit post code led readout and then we have three slim size connectors size one and two support nvme or sata operation so you can run up to four sided devices off of the first two connectors or a single uh four lane nvme the third one is nvme only so that's the pci express connection that's 12 pci express lanes then we have eight sata lanes power reset and cmos clear buttons here at the front with different coloring to help you which is awesome our front panel connection and then along the bottom edge of the motherboard we've got two five gigabit usb front panel connections an onboard usb connector if you want to run you know your hypervisor off of a usb stick you can totally do it an extra usb 2.0 header and then we've got two connectors here that are the same pin configuration as usb but they are not usb they are general purpose i o pins from the system do not plug your usb header into that you will have a bad time then we've got an ipmb header which is something that you see in servers for the management bus kind of a thing but it's present on this desktop board we've got an rs232 serial port two four pin fan headers and then of course the front panel audio connection and this is you know the dac up gigabyte real tech alc 1220 based audio codec it is a gamery codec with the 5.1 plus spdif uh thing that you would normally expect on a higher end desktop board you know higher end for on-board audio so it is nice that you have that because on server boards you typically don't have that two m.2 ports which are fully set up and ready to go for pci express 4.0 they'll work with sata or nvme then we've got a connection here at the front edge of the board for uh system power management bus a system management bus add-in sometimes you have a rack mount chassis or a chassis that reports sensors some other stuff on the system management bus that's what that header is for in terms of four pin fan headers we have a total of seven four of them are concentrated in the front edge of the motherboard you can tell again this is sort of designed for a rack where you would have you know three airflow three banks of fans or three high airflow fans at the front of the board and having all of the connectors along the front edge works really well and you might have a connector or two for the rear exhaust and maybe one just for the cpu that's pretty much the fan layout that we've got here let's take a look at that rear i o we've got our 7.1 channel audio solution our dual 10 gig nick stack our dual one gig mix and then we've got 10 gigabit usb connections except for the ones that are 20. then we've got another rs232 serial port and a vga do note that these rs232 com headers are connected to the asp 2500 your onboard ipmi solution thunderbolt header thunderbolt we interrupt this regularly scheduled motherboard review because somebody said thunderbolt thunderbolt on the wrx platform can it be this is an historic occasion gigabyte has delivered but not only have they delivered i don't know i mean i didn't get confirmation but every suggestion that i have ever made around thunderbolt support was incorporated into this motherboard alright so in the bios uh every slot has you know x16 or x4 x4 but no x8x8 option in case you have a more exotic peripheral or a bifurcation thing you know full disclosure on thunderbolt support when you enable thunderbolt sport and reboot you get a lot more options titan ridge what sort of compatibility are you looking for what sort of security level if you're having problems you can do no security which is horrifying but actually solves a lot of problems uh you can boot from assign resources and you also have to pick which slot your add-in card is i recommend the x8 slot for reasons i'm not going to get into here but especially if you're doing cross-platform stuff like with linux and windows and you want thunderbolt to work you definitely want the x8 slot um for the the port that is going to go in you've also got the option of native mode or you know native plus rtd3 hot or cold so these knobs and tunables improve compatibility um with thunderbolt because usually like these commands are just sort of set at a low level in the uefi and you can't change them but having these options means that you're going to have better compatibility with the thunderbolt peripherals on this platform and it's nice that they've exposed these because they really should have been exposed the whole time but i mean it can be a little intimidating for non-power users so for thunderbolt to work you have to enable uefi with secure boot if you don't have uefi with secure boot the uh thunderbolt options are disabled see some thunderbolt devices assume that when they plug in there's not going to be any security like it's it's a system bus you can plug in you can read directly from memory at least that's how it used to be designed that doesn't fly in the security climate of 2021 so intel's improved on thunderbolt and they've added more options to it and so on and so forth i'm using a titan ridge add-in card here and there's a ton of knobs and tunables that are exposed in the bios which can help you get whatever level of thunderbolt compatibility that you're looking for historically it's been a little hard on the amd platform to get the newer variants of thunderbolt and the security and all the stuff around that to work correctly but not anymore this actually worked fine in every scenario that i tested which is really really awesome we finally have like full first class citizen thunderbolt support on an amd platform this could even be a use case for the 16 core threadripper pro machine you got all that pcie connectivity plus thunderbolt just when you're setting it up be sure to configure uefi you have to use secure boot because of the aforementioned security issues and that kind of thing you also need to put it in a designated slot and then specify that slot in your bios so there's a lot that you can get wrong but if you follow the level one guide or you look into that kind of stuff it'll work perfectly and this is a really really awesome unique feature on this board all right back to your regularly scheduled motherboard review the rear of the board gives us some engineering clues first off there are a ton of re-drivers back here pci express 4 is a very very difficult to wrangle thing and we will learn more about that in the build phase of this video but at the rear of the board here my goodness look at all the redrivers and pci express connectivity here a lot of capacitors for power regulation and cleaning that stuff up but power electrical interference emi noise dealing with all of the layers on the pcb the chipset is located here it's a lot to juggle it's an engineering challenge to be able to deal with pci express 4.0 across all of your expansion slots and that's what we have here every single one of these expansion slots except for this one is fully 16 lanes and this one is eight lanes all seven of them pci express 4.0 that's incredible now do you see the tiny tiny kindness that gigabytes engineers could have done for us and they did not i won't go so far as to claim that this is a flaw in the design of this motherboard but it is an unfortunate reality none of the connectors at the bottom edge of the motherboard are a right angle if you have a very long card this usbc front panel connector absolutely for sure will be blocked by whatever you have in this slot now are most of you going to be running a fully populated system with full length cards no absolutely not if you're going to be running an add-in card that's only half length yes that connector will absolutely clear a half length card so no problem just something to be aware of one thing that i like with these boards if you run them in a really tall case is that you can hang the really really big gpus off of the end it's a little problematic with this setup if you intend to use any of the bottom connectors on the front panel i can probably get by without using the two four pin fan headers and just use splitters or an inbuilt control in the in the fan it kind of sucks not being able to use the audio connector if i want to run my gpu off of the bottom edge of the motherboard and of course i lose my 30 pin usb connectivity as well fortunately the 30 pin headers here if you pick up a right angle 30 pin adapter from the internet there is enough clearance using a gpu like say a 30 90. there is enough clearance to use a right angle connector here if you've got enough room for the bottom of your case to come off at a right angle i would have much preferred to have these on the front edge of the motherboard with maybe the front panel connectors located here just that might have been a little bit more problematic in terms of wiring i definitely would have moved the usbc connection somewhere else just to get it out of the way but you know hey how many people are going to run a system that's that fully populated admittedly probably not all that many you know if you were doing number crunching or anything that didn't require a gpu you'd probably have something like this this is a quadro p 2200 you can see this is a single slot card this is a perfectly reasonable workstation card and when you use this well nothing is blocked so as i always say to really get to know a motherboard you need to do a build so let's do a build with this board so as you do this build be sure to pay attention to screw placement normally there's a screw here underneath the dim and like here underneath the chipset and like here this motherboard doesn't have any of those also this screw hole is usually like about right here so when you're doing this build you know i'm getting my layout going here for custom loop cooling and all that kind of stuff i really only used one two three four five six screws in this so make sure that you got your standoffs lining up you need to take the standoffs out i've moved them over here so that i won't lose them so this machine ever gets a different motherboard it'll work but it's very important that you remove the standoffs that are not part of your motherboard's mounting plan from the case they just unscrew for this build i ended up going with fractal meshfy 2 xl because well i've got room for the gpu thing if if i do that hanging off the the end of the board that's totally an option with this case and because i could uh rout the water cooling for this in the neatest most cable managed way ever i put the radiator in the top it's an ek radiator 360 millimeter i've also got the ekd5 pump with the uh the mini reservoir actually in the bottom it's got a little bit of a tilt to it so the air will go up so for draining and filling the radiator you can just turn the case vertically which is pretty awesome you just pop the front off and unscrew the top and really it couldn't be easier to drain and fill this loop without actually having to have a special drain or fill port which is you know the laziness in me which is awesome i also routed the uh the tubing around behind the motherboard there's enough room for that so if there's ever a leak here around the pump it should just you know leak onto the uh onto the desk and maybe i'll have a clue that something has gone wrong but i've also got the option for water cooling the gpu in this in the future like i say 280 watts water cooling strictly not necessary now as this is going to be a sort of quasi test bench computer i decided to 3d print a fan adapter so that you can run a fan blowing directly over both the ram and the vrm and because i didn't want to give up the ultra ultra quiet operation of this case well i'm using a 140 millimeter fan so if you want to 3d print that i put the model up on the level one text forum it'll just hold 140 millimeter fan it uses the standard motherboard mounts there so you can use the leftover motherboard mounts in this configuration put that 140 millimeter fan there and it's totally fine i don't think you really need this if you're running with the side on but if you're running with side off this works really well my second choice would be to design a 3d print a shroud that will clamp onto the rear fan and pull air over both the vrm area and the memory really cooling the memory is what i'm worried about of this even more than the vrm i mean yeah the flare images were pretty hot but it's it's fine it's it's basically fine thanks past itself for telling me all about the whole thunderbolt thing and all of the stuff with that that is a pretty exciting setup now for a build here i'm using the fractal defined xl again i like that for these sort of big systems it is only a 280 watt cooler as i said i'm using a custom loop it's a little overkill for something like this but listen to how quiet it is this is running full tilt or even just running cena bench like cinebench r23 at a 10-minute run peak temperature is reported by the block 45 degrees c hovering around 43 44 most of the time and whisper quiet the only thing that's maybe a little problematic is when the side is off there really isn't sufficient air flow over the vrm's and the ram if you look at the flir thermal imaging camera we're pushing like 75 degrees c 80 degrees c in this kind of a setup 80 degrees c on the vrm side with the vrms that are sandwiched between the motherboard and he's saying the heatsink is doing its job and like 70-ish degrees c for the memory i think what i would do is 3d print a shroud that would use the rear exhaust fan to pull air you know over this area and over the vrm of course with the side on there is enough room because i've got 340 millimeter fans in the front and the airflow with the side on is pretty good for the motherboard vrm's are more manageable like 62-ish uh under you know 45 minute load and the chimney effect for the top you can really feel the heat coming out of the top these are the the noctua 120 millimeter you know high static pressure fans the new ones that are the tight tolerances and the motherboard will ramp up the rpms if it needs it now this was initially running box f02 upgraded to bios f03 if you're used to regular consumer grade parts there are some key things that you need to know about this motherboard first there's no xmp even though threadripper pro is compatible with regular old gamer memory there's no facilities in the bios to help you set an xmp profile the reason for that is startup pro doesn't support any real overclocking it wants to run at the jet x standard 3200 and most memory kits in the non xmp profile are 2133 or 2666 for their speed at their their standard jedeck profile and xmp is a secondary profile that has to be set in the bios you can still manually set the settings but look if you're going to buy threadripper pro opt for the you know load reduced dimms opt for the error correcting dimms opt for you know actual server grade memory actually running at 3200 that is a validated supported speed you're not taking your stability into your own hands by doing that so i wouldn't recommend anything other than registered error correcting memory for this platform personally including load reduced dimms and the fo3 bios will be necessary if you intend to use load reduced error correcting dimms as always check the qualified vendor list buy something the gigabyte has actually qualified for this motherboard one other thing i'll mention i noticed in the bill that i don't think i really called out when we were doing the motherboard overview the two on-board m.2s those are 80 millimeter so if you have 110 millimeter m.2 such as the you know 800 p optane or some of the older like p 45 11 m.2 those are 110 um not gonna work on this motherboard you're gonna have to break it out or use the slim size connections to go to something like the ic dock that we reviewed previously and then that'll handle it just fine and has supplementary cooling and you'll be all set with that not a problem another thing to keep in mind if you're not used to the whole out-of-band management server thing is this motherboard uses an a-speed 2500 it's a computer within a computer and so very important things to understand about the asp 2500 that is not specific to this motherboard but it's specific to the platform in general an asp 2500 is a computer it is a computer within a computer and most of the time the computer will not boot until the a speed 2500 boots so the asp 2500 has to boot up and read from sensors and that kind of thing to make sure that it's okay to boot up typically with a desktop board that same thing is happening with the system on chip it's just that it happens so quickly that you don't notice that it's taking a little bit to boot the system so if you use the mechanical rocker switch or something like that it's going to take a little bit for the hp 2500 to come on but the good news is the asp 2500 never turns off even when you turn off the computer that asp 2500 is in standby mode and the asp 2500 has some peripherals that it shares with your host computer one of those is a vga adapter and that's pretty cool for servers because typically you don't want an ad in gpu and a server you want to use all those pcie connectivity for network cards or storage or whatever it is built into this motherboard you can disable it because sometimes it causes problems windows was kind of freaking out because i still had it enabled when i was doing the thunderbolt stuff i was getting a little yellow exclamation on it because i never installed the asp 2500 vga drivers and you know three graphics adapters from three different vendors in the system kind of freaking windows out but once that was disabled everything's good on the thunderbolt side another thing is the asp 2500 shares its network connection with two of the onboard one gig mix so there's not a dedicated out of band ethernet management port for the asp 2500 ipmi you can configure that in bios and give it its own vlan if you really want to separate it but physically it's it's one wire it's not really a big deal the 10 gig x 550 intel of course works great the linux support on this of course works great if you do go to update your bios another wrinkle is that you got to do that through the asp 2500 so you actually go to the webpage the web management page for the motherboard that lets you read the sensors configure the fan profiles do all of that and from there you'll go to firmware and that's where you actually update the bios there's also another firmware for the asp 2500 itself that can also be updated but as of the time i'm making this video there's not any updates that gigabyte has published for that asp 2500 controller just the f03 bios because this motherboard shipped with bios fo2 this is pretty cool because you can update the bios even without a processor installed you can get sensor readings and stuff as long as the motherboard is getting standby power you can remote into it you can turn it on when it's off using that using a web gui and that's just the nature of uh these asp 2500 you know ipmi out-of-band management things so it's pretty awesome stuff it's pretty awesome stuff to include a motherboard review too so yeah in closing gigabyte has done a really good job putting this motherboard together all in all i really like it the price point really honestly is pretty incredible i got this one i ordered it from newegg i ordered it from new egg in like march as i said and it took forever for it to get here so i can't complain enough about that in fact i've got other motherboards that i ordered around the same time from newegg they still haven't shipped yet they're shipping bundles that have the same part but they're not shipping the motherboard that seems like a complaint to the ftc because clearly they have the product and they're shipping bundles with the product they're not shipping the product something hanky there's some hanky-panky going on there that's a story for another day if you are building a system like this make sure that you've got adequate airflow around the whole cpu socket area it is critical because again this platform borrows from the server where it's expected to have vacuum cleaner levels of airflow noise from the amount of air that's rushing through the chassis but this is perfectly adequate as i've shown because this is not a platform that supports overclocking there's not a lot of coloring outside the lines you can do with this there's no rgb there's not really anything on this motherboard that you don't need and the price reflects that the price is actually better than some threadripper non-pro motherboards that are out there which is really awesome if you just want to know frills you know set it and forget it workstation which is what this is got the 6700 xt in there along with the quadro p 2200 and my thunderbolt controller and i still have plenty of free pci express slots so all in all i'm pretty happy with this build i'm really happy with how it turned out i'm happy with the airflow in the meshfy 2xl i'm also happy with the noise level which is even lower than i expected it is astonishingly quiet it's been on the whole time and usually you can hear the machines when i'm you know blabbering on a little bit but yeah no it's good so yeah this has been a quick look at the gigabyte wrx 80. thunderbolt support is the the headline news for that i'm wondering this is level one i'm signing out this has been a one motherboard review i'll see in the level one forums you

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 28,340

Rating: 4.9708562 out of 5

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: D3msx3sm3Nk

Length: 24min 33sec (1473 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Slammernanners]

If AMD can get Thunderbolt in a laptop processor then that's what I'm replacing my old Intel-powered laptop with.