Gigabyte X399 Aorus Xtreme Preview

Interesting that ASUS decided to just offer VRM fans and MSI and Gigabyte decided to bring out new boards. Both this and the MSI Creation look really beefy.
 
That is a very nice looking board. Awesome to have the 10gb onboard as well as 2 other nic ports.
 
Those man hands need a manicure and lotion :rolleyes:

It is a good time to be a Gamer and hopefully by the time the chips are released memory and vid cards will be a wee bit less expensive.
 
Not on topic, but I found youtubes suggested video following this one to be ironic

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And on topic, this has everything i want but dont need. Curious to see if asus will end up doing a refresh as well.
 
I wonder if this board solves the issue where it was a pain in the ass just to secure the screw with the CPU installed inside the socket, it was so annoying and time consuming just to get the screw secured, apparently it was an issue with most if not all TR4 boards because of the socket.
 
I assume you want to go with 4 sticks of RAM for this? It pains me that 16gb modules are less per GB than 8gb I don't really need or want to spend the money on 64gb to start when 32gb will be fine.
 
Looking very interesting!

I am excited to see what Asus ROG will do with an X399 Mk2 (I don't suppose AMD's iterating to X499 the way they did with X370 > X470, but if they don't have an improvement to the chipset its good they're not just doing so for hell of it and instead giving owners more support for their existing boards) board. However, from a comment above it suggests Asus is not planning on launching a new board to go alongside the Threadripper 2000 series? Maybe its not really necessary I suppose, but given the potential for OCing CPUs with double the max cores and simply that X399 was a first iteration etc... I thought that they'd want to build something new with all they learned from the last model. Then again, maybe the Asus ROG Zenith Extreme already was a cut above and other boards are just now catching up (ie I can remember Zenith had 10-gig ethernet card using the same chipset as this Gigabyte ete). Still, I wonder how they will all stack up...
 
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That is a very nice looking board. Awesome to have the 10gb onboard as well as 2 other nic ports.

It does open up the possibilities a bit*- but what would really open them up would be official** ECC support. I wouldn't even mind if they did a 'soft segmentation' and charged a bit more for 'workstation' versions with ECC support, not dissimilar to what Intel does with their consumer-socket Xeons.

*[two gigabit NICs plus 10Gbit allow for a full-stack network segmentation (i.e., physical layer/layer 1 up to application layer, by default), such as running inline network filtering on a WAN or other link, while also allowing for high-speed network access for the rest of the system say for accessing NAS/SAN resources, or for providing them]
**[and I do mean official, not 'the hardware is there and it's not not supported' like we see with Ryzen (non-Pro) on a few consumer boards- [main use for ECC in a workstation environment is for soft RAID arrays; whether running a ZFS-supporting OS on the hardware or passing drives through to a VM, ECC goes from being 'recommended' for basic network fileserving to 'almost required' for workstation-level storage usage]
 
It does open up the possibilities a bit*- but what would really open them up would be official** ECC support. I wouldn't even mind if they did a 'soft segmentation' and charged a bit more for 'workstation' versions with ECC support, not dissimilar to what Intel does with their consumer-socket Xeons.

*[two gigabit NICs plus 10Gbit allow for a full-stack network segmentation (i.e., physical layer/layer 1 up to application layer, by default), such as running inline network filtering on a WAN or other link, while also allowing for high-speed network access for the rest of the system say for accessing NAS/SAN resources, or for providing them]
**[and I do mean official, not 'the hardware is there and it's not not supported' like we see with Ryzen (non-Pro) on a few consumer boards- [main use for ECC in a workstation environment is for soft RAID arrays; whether running a ZFS-supporting OS on the hardware or passing drives through to a VM, ECC goes from being 'recommended' for basic network fileserving to 'almost required' for workstation-level storage usage]

I’m pretty sure in time, if AMD start grabbing the share they want (5% of the Xeon market with Epyc has been mooted) that we’ll start seeing boards like the Asus Sage, either for threadripper or for Epyc. It’s a pretty heavy investment for the motherboard manufacturers at the moment though.

I’ll be keeping an eye out for ecc support, definitely would feel better with it but it’s as much for the bigger dimms for me,
 
I’ll be keeping an eye out for ecc support, definitely would feel better with it but it’s as much for the bigger dimms for me,

Aside from the PCIe lanes, the extra memory capacity (not really bandwidth) is definitely a plus.

You could easily make a very nice 'hyper-converged' compute node out of one (or a few) of these; tons of RAM for VMs, tons of storage and storage bandwidth, and high connectivity... and you can do it in 4U/ATX.
 
Nice to see the second included single-NVMe card, but I do think I like MSI's idea of putting their ITX cooler on top of the drives...

...still, looking forward to the results of the torture [H]ard|OCP standard test suite!
 
One thing that surprised me on the MSI Creation was the lack of an integrated IO panel. At $500 that should be a given. It's good to see real heatsinks on the VRM for this high power boards.
 
but now this post makes me wonder if I should consider paying more and get ECC since this will be for work.

Really need to identify an application beyond 'work' in order to make the case for ECC. High performance storage (so lots of storage and lots of simultaneous transfers) as well as number crunching that rely on high-precision results definitely fall into that category, but quite a bit of stuff doesn't :).
 
This maybe the board I will get pending review here. Looks very nice.
 
Interesting that ASUS decided to just offer VRM fans and MSI and Gigabyte decided to bring out new boards. Both this and the MSI Creation look really beefy.

Indeed they are. These are some of the beefiest boards I've ever seen.

Asus proabably was over built. The new chipset proabably doesn't even bring much.

It's almost certainly the case. ASUS tends to do so, especially in the ROG line.

I wonder if this board solves the issue where it was a pain in the ass just to secure the screw with the CPU installed inside the socket, it was so annoying and time consuming just to get the screw secured, apparently it was an issue with most if not all TR4 boards because of the socket.

I haven't run into this too much and it wasn't a problem on the MSI MEG Creation or Gigabyte X399 Designaire.

I assume you want to go with 4 sticks of RAM for this? It pains me that 16gb modules are less per GB than 8gb I don't really need or want to spend the money on 64gb to start when 32gb will be fine.

Yes, this motherboard supports Quad-channel RAM. You want four sticks with this thing.

Looking very interesting!

I am excited to see what Asus ROG will do with an X399 Mk2 (I don't suppose AMD's iterating to X499 the way they did with X370 > X470, but if they don't have an improvement to the chipset its good they're not just doing so for hell of it and instead giving owners more support for their existing boards) board. However, from a comment above it suggests Asus is not planning on launching a new board to go alongside the Threadripper 2000 series? Maybe its not really necessary I suppose, but given the potential for OCing CPUs with double the max cores and simply that X399 was a first iteration etc... I thought that they'd want to build something new with all they learned from the last model. Then again, maybe the Asus ROG Zenith Extreme already was a cut above and other boards are just now catching up (ie I can remember Zenith had 10-gig ethernet card using the same chipset as this Gigabyte ete). Still, I wonder how they will all stack up...

ASUS just added a cooling fan to the box. The only real change needed relates to thermals. A highly overclocked 2990WX pulls a fuck ton of power and the VRMs, RAM, and CPU end up running much hotter than they did running a Threadripper 1950X.
 
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