So it was announced a while ago, and now there are a few more details, including pricing and release dates:



All have 64 lanes of PCIe into the CPU with 4 being dedicated to the chipset as well as quad channel DDR4 (with ECC support).

With a whopping 60 lanes some of the motherboards I saw come with a configuration of;

16x pcie
8x pcie
16x pcie
8x pcie
Three m.2 x4 slots (with nvme)

All of the above available at once piping straight into the CPU, bypassing the chipset (the x399 chipset then gets the remaining 4 lanes and the boards have about 8 SATA 6Gb/s connectors, a bunch of USB ports etc).




The above from a Techreport article

An interesting thing in the above article is the ability to switch modes of the CPU, which ends up affecting latency etc. Should be interesting to see how the higher-core-count CPUs perform with DAWbench.

Interesting. Looks like AMD is back in the game for real. I was worried that the initial Ryzen was kind of a test to see what direction they were going to go in but it looks like they are serious about competing in the high end CPU game. Good. Bring it on. Game on.

Well, it makes total sense. They're producing one wafer with one die on it, and then they're using the best of the best for the most demanding platforms EPYC and Threadripper. All other dies end up in Ryzen and the upcoming APUs. And then they've done their design of the Infinity Fabric interconnect already, so really there's probably way lower costs for AMD to adapt and push out new products compared to Intel. And this way they get to use close to all their dies. If a core is not up to par in a die they can disable it and use it in a hex-core or quad-core CPU. If all cores are operating fine but aren't super-efficient they go into Ryzen octa-cores. Etc.

I mean, the profit margins on the wafers must look pretty good for AMD right now.

I'm quite impressed generally speaking.

Thanks for the info. I haven't looked at their Road Map in quite sometime and didn't realize what they were up to. I used to hang out at AMDZONE.Com which was mostly AMD engineers that lived in the Texas area were AMD is/was based? Anyway most of their tech. dialogue was WAY over my head but I was able to convey to some of them regarding our DAW needs and uses (instruction sets etc.) and it was very educational for a while but last I checked the site doesn't exist anymore. I'll have to keep an eye out on their Road Map again and yes this is very exciting news and hopefully bring prices down for both AMD and die hard Intel fans.

Wccftech has an x399 motherboard roundup that's useful to get a quick view of what's available. One thing that stands out is that some motherboards list DDR4 3600 from launch. Seems buyers will hit far higher speeds from the start than on Ryzen.

The industry are releasing real cpu monsters

That MSI board appears to have some good features for the money.

I've had really bad luck with MSI. 3 RMA's is enough for me. I'll wait for Gigabyte or Asus or Asrock. All 3 have been rock solid through many builds for me, friends and others.

Interesting

And interestingly both Asrock and Asus have the 'cheapest' boards as well, at $340 and $350.

My consideration would be how many m.2, PCIe and ethernet connections the board allows.

MSI typically rushes out the first board with new CPU releases with all the bells and whistles appealing to gamers. Asrock is cheapest because they are the budget division of a merger between ECS and Asus. Gigabyte is always my first choice and usually have a variety of differently priced models.

Well, on the other hand this time around I believe most of these boards had their origin in x299, and were at least partially adapted to x399. In addition to that the dies used in the Threadripper CPUs are the Zen dies, no modifications. So I would guess that that's why we're seeing a 3600 DDR speed at launch, and I'm also guessing compatibility and stability etc would be better than with Ryzen.

Now that these new multi core monsters require a lot of power and things start to get warm, I have become more interested in stuff like VRMs and 8+8 pin configs. The Skylake X's TIM and small IHS combined with some dubious VRMs in many X299 boards is possibly a problematic combo compared to Threadrippers larger and soldered IHS combined with something like MSI's 10+3 phase design. Looks like some drastic but sensible decisions have been made with this launch. Hope so.

Regarding MSI. Actually, Pete from Scan recently recommended MSI for Intel machines if Thunderbolt was not important (and TB is so far not an option for any AMD machine, anyway). He said that their boards were the easiest to configure. Didn't mention quality issues, though, and Pete is a builder that I trust completely.

Perhaps you were just unlucky, Alndln? That sucks, and I totally understand it if you've had it with them, but wouldn't you think that there are users out there that could share similar experiences with any of the other manufacturers as well?

I'm pretty sure most manufacturers have duds, and even maybe parts of batches that are prone to fault. Come to think of it, didn't a bunch of ASUS boards get bricked or something around the Ryzen launch?

I wrote this a couple of days ago in another thread but I guess it belongs here. Now the media seem to have noticed the same thing as me: Unannounced Ryzen Threadripper 1920 CPU leaked by AMD motherboard support pages | PCWorld

That unboxing video at the bottom of the page makes me cringe... a confirmation about sheer incompetence of some "journalists".

Ha ha, what a mess.

More TR news: AMD has posted a list of compatible liquid coolers. Has anybody got experience with these and know which ones are both high performance products in addition to being suitable for a quiet build? https://www.amd.com/en/thermal-solutions-threadripper

I always prefer Noctua to liquid cooling solutions, silence-wise.

Yes to all the above. Every firm gets it wrong sometimes, and I had a X99 MSI board at launch do some crazy erratic stuff so I'll freely admit to some glorious screw ups from them. It got resolved after month of them looking into, but obviously frustrating at the time.

They all have their moments, for me its whether or not they are capable of fixing them. In the instance noted above they dropped the ball and I fully understand someones distrust of them after that. They've done well by me in the past and in general I don't have to talk to their techs all that often, I obviously can't speak for peoples experiences in other timezones. Maybe my local support team is just on top of things in general, some others may not be.

Seems there is another cheaper, less power hungry 12 core TR coming. I have a feeling this one will be very popular, the only thing missing ATM is the price.

ASUS, ASRock and Gigabyte confirm Ryzen Threadripper 1920 with 140W TDP

TR 1920, 12C/24T, 3.2/3.8 GHz, 140W

Yeah, I've actually been a bit shocked by it during these past few months. These guys in particular, or that main guy I should say, just recently proclaimed that you could only get one x16 card into an x370 mother board, and if you then attached an nvme m.2 drive which is x4 the x16 video card wold drop down to x8. Which is just plain wrong. I mean, the chip has been out since March so how on earth can he get that wrong after all this time and not be corrected by any of the other THREE on their show.

Garbage. All they do is read someone else's news off of a laptop in front of a camera....

Yes, I believe Skap mentioned it earlier. I agree it'll probably be pretty popular although I'm sure it depends on price. I also recall seeing other non-x Threadrippers in one leak.

The 1700 is 'only' $30 cheaper than the 1700x right now on Newegg. At the price level of this x399 platform I doubt for example $50 will cut it to get people to buy a 1920. After all, out of about $1,100 (cpu+mobo) another $50-ish seems like a pretty small deal. I'd guess they have to 'rebate' it by at least $100, so I'd guess maybe $650.....?

My guess is $699

Yeah was thinking the same, makes the most sense I believe. Now all I have to do is wait for Thunderbolt 3 support to arrive on the AMD platform (which should happen early 2018 when Intel makes the license free for all), and I will probably pick up a 1920 or 1920x for my new build!

After skim reading about some of the new Threadripper motherboards on an Overclockers forum it appears some may not be using all the extra PCIe lanes the CPU offers and have things like SATA sharing lanes (not taking advantage of an important improvement). For the early adopters, pay attention to the exact details of the motherboards on your short list. It looks like some motherboards may have made compromises to get product out there. Like with every other release, if you can wait a bit, then real world testing will give us the data to make a more informed decision.

Really? I have a hard time seeing that that's the case. The fewest PCIe slots I've seen has been, what... four? Then they'll run x16 x8 x16 x8. That's 48 lanes. Then I'm guessing those boards have 3 m.2 drives which are all x4 for a total of 12 lanes, plus the 48 which is 60. That leaves the four dedicated to the x399 chipset.

The whole benefit of the Ryzen connectivity 'layout', as well as Threadripper's, is that you can pipe x4 m.2 drives straight into the CPU, which you by default didn't do on competing Intel platforms. On the Intel boards the m.2 drives went through the chipset and the dedicated four lanes connecting it to the CPU. So even if Ryzen/TR doesn't use all lanes (which I'm betting they do) you still get all the data bandwidth you can get through m.2, a clear improvement (theoretically) over Intel's at least previous offerings.

I think the thought is that for superior drive performance you'll use m.2, and for other uses such as optical drives, large volumes etc, you'll use SATA hanging off of the 4 chipset lanes.

So I really don't see how what you're saying (they say) is correct. I just think someone is missing something..... (and I suppose that could be me)

It's not that Threadripper's lanes were not an improvement, it was that some motherboards didn't take advantage of all the lanes (leaving lanes unused) and combined functions on a smaller amount of lanes. Again it was just a skim read but raised a red flag I though worth sharing as I wouldn't be surprised that a few motherboards did not take full advantage of the new design to get product out there. If I see more detail about this or stumble across what I read again I'll try and link it back here.

I understand what you meant. I just don't think any motherboards ended up not using all the lanes. My hunch is that whoever it was that complained the complaint was over limiting the number of PCIe slots to four rather than giving more slots. Some mobos in the round up have six slots. But obviously, when this is done there needs to be a compromise because even with 60 lanes available something's gotta give if they also have several m.2 drives on the board.

So, this "sharing" is really just a somewhat dumb way of looking at it (not your dumb way, that person's presumed dumb way). Because either every single connection to the CPU gets a dedicated amount of lanes that never changes, in which case as I mentioned a configuration of 16/8/16/8/4/4/4 is possible but the person then complains about there only being four PCIe slots, or there are more connections than lanes in which case the person will complain about sharing resources.

The situation is actually far worse on the consumer side of things. With Ryzen for example even with the x370 resources are shared and it gets annoying pretty quickly when trying to figure out just which slot gets how many lanes under what condition.

Of course there are some assumptions above about what that person meant, so I'd welcome a link to it...

Yeah, that's what people keep telling me, that liquid coolers make more noise with the pump and everything.

The good thing about the new Noctua coolers is that they make a bigger plate that covers more of Threadripper's IHS than the liquid coolers with adapters. Do we know if Noctua plans to release a TR version of D15 as well, or is it just those three "smaller" ones?

Edit: Apparently no D15 due to conflicting RAM slots on some mobos (even though that hasn't stopped them before, but I guess the market is smaller for this platform): http://noctua.at/en/can-i-upgrade-my...ket-tr4-or-sp3

The NH-U14S TR4-SP3 should be good enough.