MSI MEG X399 Creation for 2nd Gen Threadripper

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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We have been hammering on the MSI MEG X399 Creation motherboard with all sorts of 2nd Gen Threadripper for a about a week now, and it has not missed a beat. MSI did just get its product page posted on this board if you are interested, and video to show off its highlights as well. We got in too big a hurry to do an "unboxing," but will give it that treatment when we get a break in testing. The Creation has shown up over on Newegg for pre-order for $500 with a release date noted at 8/13/2018.

Check out the pic and video.

Supports 1st and 2nd Gen AMD® RYZEN™ THREADRIPPER™ Series Processors
Support 8 DIMMs, Quad Channel DDR4 3600+ (OC)
Maximum Power: 19 phases digital power with heat-pipe heatsink design
Maximum Temperature Control: Full fan control with 10 PWM fan headers and 3 dedicated thermal sensors
Maximum Storage: 7 x Turbo M.2 with M.2 XPANDER-AERO and AMD StoreMI technology
Maximum Data Transfer: Dual Gigabit LAN with Dual-band Wireless-AC and bandwidth management
 
Holy Moly, and people complain that Intel HEDT is too expensive. What in the world makes this worth $500? This is a $300 board, tops.
 
That m.2 Xpander - any chance that thing's a non-proprietary PCI-E card that could be sold separately and used anywhere?
 
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Wait I thought that Intel HEDT was far too expensive, but AMD is inexpensive. Been told here many times. I get so confused, cause the board I was looking at for a 7820x was just around $250 and seemed to be pretty close to this with all the features I would use (also MSI who I love).

Hahahah that came in while I was posting this ^^^^^
 
Budwise said:
Holy Moly, and people complain that Intel HEDT is too expensive. What in the world makes this worth $500? This is a $300 board, tops.
Click to expand...
Well, this is an HEDT board built for overclocking and features in every way. There are plenty of others out there should you not wish to pay for the features. But no, this is not a $300 board.
 
Yea, the quad M.2 expander sure does add value to this. Single adapters you can find all day. Duals are harder, so many of them want to use SATA and not the PCIE for the data transfer. (let me know if you know of any good clean PCIe dual M.2 boards) Quad and PCIe 16x? Now you're in the big bucks.

I mean, if you're already looking at a ~$1800 CPU....

I think it would be neat as hell to have an all M.2 storage solution, and with the price of these 1TB sticks coming down it's really going to be a reality soon. Man, the only cables you would have in your case would be power for mobo, fans, and GPU. How clean is that?
 
haste. said:
Wait I thought that Intel HEDT was far too expensive, but AMD is inexpensive. Been told here many times. I get so confused, cause the board I was looking at for a 7820x was just around $250 and seemed to be pretty close to this with all the features I would use (also MSI who I love).

Hahahah that came in while I was posting this ^^^^^
Click to expand...

Intel HEDT high end is extremely expensive. While X399 motherboards are expensive they can still be obtained at $300ish new, x299 boards aren't much cheaper go check prices on the x299 rampage extreme and apex.

The 7820x's competition from AMD is a 1800x/2700x (as both are 8 core / 16 thread) which is much cheaper and the motherboard for Ryzen's consumer chips are also much cheaper than x299.
 
I guess the question I have is, which refresh board to go with? Right now it seems MSI & Gigabyte. But I'll obviously want to choose one to arrive the same day as the CPU.
 
ASUS-X399-Ryzen-Threadripper-WX-Series_Cooling-Kit_3.png IMG_20180808_120953.jpg
 
ssnyder28 said:
Intel HEDT high end is extremely expensive. While X399 motherboards are expensive they can still be obtained at $300ish new, x299 boards aren't much cheaper go check prices on the x299 rampage extreme and apex.

The 7820x's competition from AMD is a 1800x/2700x (as both are 8 core / 16 thread) which is much cheaper and the motherboard for Ryzen's consumer chips are also much cheaper than x299.
Click to expand...
Was some sarcasm in my post, but the point is that now that AMD is competing we are seeing competitive pricing.

Oh and I have a Microcenter so really the pricing isn't much different.
 
This bad boy pretty much checks all the boxes. Only a red H on the guys' review will stop me from this board.

Kinda sad there is no 10G, but the slots and lanes are there for an add-in card later as 10G isn't really mainstream yet anyway.

Will have to find a happy medium between full RAM slots or full m.2's. First world problems ftw.
 
CombatChrisNC said:
Yea, the quad M.2 expander sure does add value to this. Single adapters you can find all day. Duals are harder, so many of them want to use SATA and not the PCIE for the data transfer. (let me know if you know of any good clean PCIe dual M.2 boards) Quad and PCIe 16x? Now you're in the big bucks.

I mean, if you're already looking at a ~$1800 CPU....

I think it would be neat as hell to have an all M.2 storage solution, and with the price of these 1TB sticks coming down it's really going to be a reality soon. Man, the only cables you would have in your case would be power for mobo, fans, and GPU. How clean is that?
Click to expand...

SOOO nice!


I took the plunge with the CH vii Hero wifi and have 1 NVME m.2 for the OS and one M.2 sata in the second slot for games/storage. I also run an ITX box with one 500g NVME only. After using these I'm never buying regular drives again for new builds unless its for NAS or some other bulk storage reason where spinners are still king.


Excited for this MSI Mobo/TR2 review!
 
I must say this site continually impresses with me how quickly it is able to get content and news out there.

That M2 card, wow! Even without it, though, is 3x m2 even common on HEDT? That alone is still pretty impressive. One of the slots is 22x110, not sure how common that is but maybe we'll see bigger M2 cards so that's nice. The thought of 6TB of solid state storage without a single riser card or SATA cable is damn cool.


What's that coaxial wifi thing all about?

$500 mobo
$2,000 ram
$1800 CPU
$1000 WC
$2500 Titan V
$1500 3x 970 Pro

Make for a pretty nice bling bling gaming setup and it's not even 10 grand :)
 
TheHig said:
SOOO nice!


I took the plunge with the CH vii Hero wifi and have 1 NVME m.2 for the OS and one M.2 sata in the second slot for games/storage. I also run an ITX box with one 500g NVME only. After using these I'm never buying regular drives again for new builds unless its for NAS or some other bulk storage reason where spinners are still king.


Excited for this MSI Mobo/TR2 review!
Click to expand...
IMG_20180808_124422.jpg IMG_20180808_124430.jpg IMG_20180808_124519.jpg IMG_20180808_124524.jpg IMG_20180808_124800.jpg
 
Now that's what all those PCIE slots and lanes are for now that SLI/Crossfire is pretty much a waste for gaming.

Sweet!
 
ZeqOBpf6 said:
That M2 card, wow! Even without it, though, is 3x m2 even common on HEDT?
Click to expand...

Got a couple of uses, though none mainstream: if you happen to be running 10Gbit, you're at 1100MB/s transfer speeds; if you need to write that to a mirror (think NAS receive buffer), then you need four SATA, or you can do it with two NVMe as one drive can handle that alone.

Further, with Intel pushing QLC NAND into NVMe, you can set up pretty large storage with pretty crazy read speeds, even going for RAID5 (or soft equivalent) where you only lose one drives' worth of capacity for redundancy and get three drives' worth of read speed.

And if 10Gbit isn't enough, you can always try RDMA to push data around at 40Gbps+ with low latency :D


[actual use case: setting up two or more of these as a cluster, something like this, either to work on and/or to learn from, potentially picking up used stuff which is quickly coming down in price]
 
With TR2 the Top CPU which is $1800 has 32cores and 64 threads compared to the i9-7980XE which is 18/36 and also costs $1900... This MSI board includes the quad PCIE card which is probably worth 100 on its own. I don't think anyone who is dropping that kind of cash on either of those CPUs is going to sweat 200 bucks.

In no way am I fanning any Intel vs AMD flame war but AMD is killing it with value at the high end here.
 
Budwise said:
I have an X299 Taichi XE, one of the better X299 HEDT boards on the market and it was $300. You can get sub $200 X299 boards today. The Taichi XE matches almost every spec listed here, where's the $200 worth of features, more M.2 options? Sure you can spend 500 on X299 boards too, but that is just as asinine.

Call me old I guess, get off my lawn with them stupid prices...
Click to expand...

You can get X399 boards for under $300 from Asrock, Asus and MSI. The X399 Taichi XE is $10 cheaper than your X299 board....

The company that has the highest CPU marketshare is always going to get the largest selection of supporting components.
 
TheHig said:
I don't think anyone who is dropping that kind of cash on either of those CPUs is going to sweat 200 bucks.
Click to expand...

Sure, but (pedantic counter-point coming) if your purpose is to overclock for maximum single-thread performance while having all of those PCIe lanes available, you may be shooting significantly lower on the core count.

*yeah, it's pedantic...
 
Budwise said:
I have an X299 Taichi XE, one of the better X299 HEDT boards on the market and it was $300. You can get sub $200 X299 boards today. The Taichi XE matches almost every spec listed here, where's the $200 worth of features, more M.2 options? Sure you can spend 500 on X299 boards too, but that is just as asinine.

Call me old I guess, get off my lawn with them stupid prices...
Click to expand...
Ok. Thanks for sharing.
 
CombatChrisNC said:
OK.... WHY is there a 6-pin power on the card? Can not a single fan and 4x NVMe drives pull enough from the PCIe slot?
Click to expand...
Straight from MSI, but their guy is out in the field right now so not a very in-depth explanation.

"PCIe cant power all 4 ssd so that's just extra power."
 
Looks like a nice board.

It's a shame those aren't 10Gbase-T ports... I'd like to see that on a $500 board...

Also, the fact that there are just 4 16x PCIe slots, seems a bit limiting.

Power user boards like this used to come with 7 or 8 slots in total. I wish it had 8 slots total, 4 slots would default to 16x, unless the slot directly next to it were populated, in which case they switch to two 8x slots.

I guess this is more of a high end "gaming" board though, considering all those flashy LED's. Gaming systems tend to use 16x slots for GPU's, but only very rarely use 8x slots like workstations use a lot of.

I also find the inclusion of WiFi cards on high end desktop/workstation boards annoying. Why am I paying for that junk I will never use? If a PC is stationary, you really shouldn't be using WiFi.

I also have to roll my eyes at the disco lights.

It looks impressive in many ways, but in many ways I also wish they had made different choices.

If I were shopping for TR2, I'd probably wait for the Workstation version of a board. Same as the above, with more flexible PCIe layout as described, two 10Gbase-T ports and no disco lights or WiFi card.

I'm not shopping for TR2 right now though. I already blew my 2018 upgrade budget on a power amplifier. Next year... The x79 [email protected] just keeps still performing well enough, that I cant justify getting rid of it :p
 
Last edited:
ZeqOBpf6 said:
I must say this site continually impresses with me how quickly it is able to get content and news out there.

That M2 card, wow! Even without it, though, is 3x m2 even common on HEDT? That alone is still pretty impressive. One of the slots is 22x110, not sure how common that is but maybe we'll see bigger M2 cards so that's nice. The thought of 6TB of solid state storage without a single riser card or SATA cable is damn cool.


What's that coaxial wifi thing all about?

$500 mobo
$2,000 ram
$1800 CPU
$1000 WC
$2500 Titan V
$1500 3x 970 Pro

Make for a pretty nice bling bling gaming setup and it's not even 10 grand :)
Click to expand...

Just one Titan V? ... peasant. j/k :D

You'll pop $10k with a case, cooling solution and peripherals, not to mention the monitors. (y)

edit: And for $500 I would expect a functional spell-check, at a minimum:
"MYSTIC LIGHT: 16.8 milliom colors / 17 effects controlled in one click. MYSTIC LIGHT EXTENSION support both RGB and RAINBOW LED strip"
 
Budwise said:
Holy Moly, and people complain that Intel HEDT is too expensive. What in the world makes this worth $500? This is a $300 board, tops.
Click to expand...

Uhm, no, sorry. Have you seen that VRM? That's one of the biggest choke arrays on a board that can be bought with money. On top of that you have 3x M.2 built-in + 4x M.2 on a riser, dual intel NIC, AC WiFi built in (not like my x399 carbon which was an add-in-board), 8 sata ports, 2x USB3.0 front-panels combined with a USB 3.1 front panel header... This thing is as premium as it gets.






it's a real shame it's ugly as sin... maybe why they named it Meg...

megg.png
 
Quick question. So, I have an SLI build (and assuming the next gen cards support SLI, will continue to), and another PCI express card (single slot). It looks like the M2 card is a dual slot? So, which slots does their SLI bridge connect too? Just trying to figure out if everything can fit. I'd love to have 7 M2 HDDs.
 
Nytegard said:
Quick question. So, I have an SLI build (and assuming the next gen cards support SLI, will continue to), and another PCI express card (single slot). It looks like the M2 card is a dual slot? So, which slots does their SLI bridge connect too? Just trying to figure out if everything can fit. I'd love to have 7 M2 HDDs.
Click to expand...
Manual is online.

upload_2018-8-8_18-16-30.png
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Looks like a nice board.

It's a shame those aren't 10Gbase-T ports... I'd like to see that on a $500 board...

Also, the fact that there are just 4 16x PCIe slots, seems a bit limiting.

Power user boards like this used to come with 7 or 8 slots in total. I wish it had 8 slots total, 4 slots would default to 16x, unless the slot directly next to it were populated, in which case they switch to two 8x slots.

I guess this is more of a high end "gaming" board though, considering all those flashy LED's. Gaming systems tend to use 16x slots for GPU's, but only very rarely use 8x slots like workstations use a lot of.

I also find the inclusion of WiFi cards on high end desktop/workstation boards annoying. Why am I paying for that junk I will never use? If a PC is stationary, you really shouldn't be using WiFi.

I also have to roll my eyes at the disco lights.

It looks impressive in many ways, but in many ways I also wish they had made different choices.

If I were shopping for TR2, I'd probably wait for the Workstation version of a board. Same as the above, with more flexible PCIe layout as described, two 10Gbase-T ports and no disco lights or WiFi card.

I'm not shopping for TR2 right now though. I already blew my 2018 upgrade budget on a power amplifier. Next year... The x79 [email protected] just keeps still performing well enough, that I cant justify getting rid of it :p
Click to expand...
We think alike!

RGB is silly. Any workstation board without at least one 10G Ethernet is a joke given the use cases for 32core CPUs. ECC support is a must as well.

TR only has 60x PCIe lanes available since the chipset chews through 4x. Also 10G will eat up another 2-4x depending on number of ports, leaving about 56x. I’d like to see several TB3/USB-c 10G ports as well. That probably leaves 48x PCIe lanes. Easy enough to use a PCIe switch or two to get 6-8x 16 lane PCIe connects, maybe with splitting to 8/8.

Probably a $600+ board, but I’ll be waiting and hoping for such a beast with Zen2/TR3.

Edit: love the quad m.2!
 
Isn't Epyc geared for workstation usage? This is for small business IMO, video rendering, 3D animation perhaps indie game development and the like. I could see the 2990 being used by a number of Youtube channels. SLI isn't' really a thing anymore so you could use one GPU for Premiere rendering and another to play a game while you wait for it to render before uploading.
 
Budwise said:
I have an X299 Taichi XE, one of the better X299 HEDT boards on the market and it was $300. You can get sub $200 X299 boards today. The Taichi XE matches almost every spec listed here, where's the $200 worth of features, more M.2 options? Sure you can spend 500 on X299 boards too, but that is just as asinine.

Call me old I guess, get off my lawn with them stupid prices...
Click to expand...


Why does it bother you so much? Almost isn't every feature of course either, and lets face it (I have x299 apex and i9 currently too), AMD has an amazing come back product that looks to out perform Intel by a good margin at times, so why do you feel so badly that AMD should sell it on the cheap while we paid premium coin for our i9/x299 gear?


It's exciting times (again) for all of us, Intel or AMD fan boys... Intel will be pushed and driven once again, AMD looks to be on fire and has a solid road map (its not all a one off desperate attempt to compete).
 
I wonder if you could slave all the m.2 drives in this in a Raid 0... what would that speed / performance look like...
 
Sindalis said:
I wonder if you could slave all the m.2 drives in this in a Raid 0... what would that speed / performance look like...
Click to expand...

Napkin math says 4GB/s per M.2 NVMe on PCIe 3.0, so potentially 16GB/s reads/writes if the drives can keep up?

We know that they can't, just yet, but >10GB/s should be fairly easy.

Now who is going to set up a 100GB RAMDrive to properly test this?

:D
 
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