In case you need just a bit more Computex news, ASRock is jumping into the high-end AMD desktop platform with two new X399 motherboards using the massive TR4 socket for AMD Threadripper. The new premium motherboards are part of the company’s Professional Gaming and Taichi series and are packed with workstation friendly features.
HardwareCanucks spotted the new boards on the show floor.
Both motherboards arare clad in black and silver colors with the professional gaming having some red accents and the Taichi having a stylized gear shaped chipset heatsink. The ASRock X399 Professional Gaming and X399 Taichi both feature eight DDR4 DIMM slots supporting quad channel memory, four PCI-E 3.0 x16 slots, one PCI-E x1 slot, three Ultra M.2 (x4 PCI-E or SATA drives), one U.2 port, and eight SATA 6Gbps ports. The boards are powered by a 24-pin ATX, 8-pin and 4-pin EPS12V and a 6-pin PCI-E power connector to provide stable slot power to PCI-E devices like graphics cards. The Professional Gaming reportedly has a 10+2 power phase feeing the CPU and memory, and while there is no confirmation that the Taichi also has this it should be close if not the same power phase design.
In addition to aesthetic design choices, the boards differ in networking and audio with the ASRock X399 Professional Gaming sporting Creative Sound Blaster Cinema 3 and the X399 Taichi have Purity Sound 4. The Threadripper motherboards both support Wi-Fi and two Intel Gigabit Ethernet ports. The X399 Professional Gaming adds a 10 Gigabit Ethernet interface that is not present on the Taichi, however.
Rear I/O on the TR4 X399 motherboards include eight USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports, three USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports (including one Type-C), dual (Intel) Gigabit Ethernet, six audio connections (5 analog, one digital), two Wi-Fi antenna connectors, and a single PS/2 port. The X399 Professional Gaming also has 10GbE port.
Unfortunately, no word on pricing or availability.
We will have to wait for reviews to know for sure, but it appears that while ASRock did not go quite as crazy with the power input as Asus and it’s ROG Zenith Extreme, the company has some nice-looking motherboards. Hopefully they perform as well as they look and enable enthusiasts to push the envelope in terms of hardware and clockspeeds when overclocking. If you are interested in these motherboards, Computerbase.de has several more photos of them on their site.
If you are looking for something a "bit" smaller, ASRock also unveiled the Mini ITX X370 Gaming-ITX/ac that uses the X370 chipset on the AM4 (Ryzen) platform.
Interesting that the audio
Interesting that the audio ports are mid-IO panel.
2017 is turning to be a kick
2017 is turning to be a kick as year for AMD…
I’m flabergasted at the amount of products AMD is producing !
– Scorpio is an amazing SoC with very unique brand new features.
– Zen is a formidable design. 5 instruction per clock and super SMT
– Desktop Ryzen in 4 – 8 cores, with really nice coolers
– An entire 1s & 2s EPYC server platform (due in 2 weeks)
– A brand new HEDT with quad channel, 16 core, 64PCIe (2 month)
– Then a Complete Zen+Vega SoC and a whole new laptop platform
– And cherry on top a desktop Vega GPU for Pro & consumer integrating HBM2
Did I miss anything ?!
I do not recognize AMD at all… where did this come from !
They’ve been working on this
They’ve been working on this for five years, trying to keep the lights on with other products until the were ready for the big launch. They bet the wrong way with Bulldozer, then the 20nm node was a failure and they couldn’t do much to improve clock speeds or add cores as they’d planned.
14nm and Zen coincided nicely to make a huge advance over their older chips.
Apart from the items you listed, there’s Vega 11, “small Vega”, which will replace the RX 580 and 570.
There’s also been leaks of a mid-range server chip, “Snowy Owl”, with 16 cores, similar to TR but on a different socket. That might be a high-end embedded CPU for networking equipment, or those might be two different products.
There’s also a planned HPC chip for supercomputers – probably 4 of the APU dies on a package the way EPYC is 4 Zeppelin dies, so 16 cores and 4096 shaders.
And there’s Ryzen “Pro” CPUs and APUs coming, which are mostly just marketing; Ryzen desktop and laptop chips with enterprise management features enabled.
Hmm, yes there is a server
Hmm, yes there is a server chip for networking equipment, not sure if it was Snowy Owl or the other one whos codename I can't remember ;). Edit: Oh, you're right Snowy Owl is the networking one, the other way was Great Horned Owl and that was for their embedded series and has a GPU in it w/ fewer CPU cores.
I had not heard about Vega 11, so RX 680? Is that why AMD is doing RX Vega ### for the real Vega? heh. Either way the miners are gonna scoop them all up :/.
Anyone think we will see some crazy SR-2-like board with 2 TR4 sockets next year? hehe
> 2 TR4 sockets next year?
> 2 TR4 sockets next year? hehe
Tim, see these chipset diagrams I found recently:
I don’t know if they are accurate, so FYI:
http://www.overclockingmadeinfrance.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/AMD-X399-X390-Chipsets.jpg
i rather the company take
i rather the company take their time, than to RUSH like intel has done for the passed years since the core duo and core 2 duo times. Every chip since that time has had some kind of problem, however intel fans seemed to ashamed to admit it along with intel. look at intels no X line. a few reviewers have said, it was a rushed and BAD idea just so you can compete with AMD. whats really sad, their fans are going to buy the failure chips.
“Every chip since that time
“Every chip since that time has had some kind of problem,”
About the only problems I can recall that remained unfixed are: The old SATA bug with the initial batch of the P67 chipset (man, that was 6 years ago!) and the TSX bug with Haswell (I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone ever actually implementing TSX support though, even in HPC).
And it’s not as if AMD are immune from bugs, e.g. the GCC segfault issue on RyZen, the FMA3 bug (now fixed in the AGESA update), etc.
Big chips are big, bugs happen and are fixed.