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AMD X399 Ultra Durable motherboard with Dual Intel GbE LAN, Triple M.2 with Thermal Guard, 120dB SNR ALC1220, Front & Rear USB 3.1 Type-C, RGB FUSION 2.0, Intel Dual Band 802.11ac WiFi+BT4.2, Base Plated & I/O Shield Armor
Supports AMD 2 nd Generation Ryzen™ Threadripper™ and 1 st Generation Ryzen™ Threadripper™ Processors With support for three double-wide graphics cards and three NVMe SSDs, the Strix X399-E Gaming can easily scale up or down to meet your needs. There’s enough breathing room to run dual 2.5-slot cards like our Strix GTX 1080 Ti–and at a full 16 PCIe lanes per card. Primary M.2 drives get cooling from the chipset heatsink, while secondary SSDs poke out of a vertical slot with that can benefit from chassis airflow. An oasis in a market flooded with gaming everything, the Prime X399-A dresses Threadripper in more professional attire while maintaining a stylish edge. It’s the most logical choice for a do-everything workhorse that plays to Threadripper’s strengths without spending too much of the budget on extras. With the family tree sorted, it’s time for a closer look at each board. The top is as good a place as any to start. They’ve churned out a smart cooling set up to cope with different temperature ranges. There are plenty of fan headers on board and you have complete control over them via Total Fan Control. We’ve observed impressive thermals of 26 degrees C at idle and 40 degrees C under load for the VRM.
Drivers and Software
When PCIe is the game, it becomes time to play with controllers and ports to see what fits. It all starts with the underlying diagram for Threadripper and X399: Bandwidth is a huge part of Threadripper’s appeal. The mother lode of PCI Express lanes stands ready for the multiple high-end graphics cards required for truly cutting-edge gaming and VR experiences. All of our X399 motherboards support three-way SLI and CrossFireX setups, and the Zenith Extreme can call upon a fourth card for record-setting benchmark attempts or an extra jolt of compute power. To protect your investment, SafeSlot reinforces the graphics slots against damage from increasingly heavy GPU coolers. Bandwidth ripples across every inch of the processor. The PCI Express 3.0 controller boasts 64 individual lanes, 60 of which are available for graphics cards, NVMe SSDs, and other peripherals. To put that into perspective, Ryzen has just 20 open lanes, or a third of the peripheral bandwidth inside Threadripper. The diagram shows the two hubs for everything to connect to: the CPU and the chipset. The CPU has 60 PCIe lanes, provided in 3 or 4 PCIe root complexes at x16 each (the diagram above suggests x16/x8/x16/x8). These will often go towards the main PCIe slots to support add-in cards like GPUs, or they could be partitioned off for RAID controllers or fast ethernet if required. In total, AMD has stated that the platform can support six GPUs maximum. The CPU also supports eight USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) Type-A ports, quad channel DDR4, and support for up to three PCIe 3.0 x4 storage drives for 3-way NVMe. The silicon is lithographed using the advanced 14 nm FinFET manufacturing process with stapled transistors (also known as 3D transistors). The striking scale reduction has resulted in more space becoming available on the CPU die, and the size of the Threadripper CPU enables the integration of a total of 8 MB L2 Cache and a full 32 MB Level 3 Cache at the heart of the processor. Due to the smart control of the cache buffer and "Smart Prefetch" algorithms for highly-efficient jump predictions, Ryzen is a byword for fast and smooth data processing under all usage scenarios - ranging from gaming and virtual reality to cloud computing and virtualisation.
The secondary heat sink is connected to the MOSFETs heatsink via a heat pipe to help their cooling. When we take a look at the fan headers, there are a moderate number of them but not something to be called “so many”.Gaming is more than just playing. There’s a whole world of streaming and broadcasting that has turned it into a form of entertainment watched by millions. A product of this new regime, the Strix X399-E Gaming brings Threadripper’s horsepower to bear on high-quality streaming and complex post-production while keeping one foot firmly planted in hardcore gameplay.
Designed for the growing community that defines the gaming scene, the Strix X399-E channel’s ROG’s pedigree to help gaming PCs exceed expectations. It will be available in late August in the US and Canada with pricing to be announced closer to its release. Two RGB headers prime the X399-A to illuminate up to four meters of lighting at optimal brightness. The lighting on the board itself is discreet, with a gentle glow emanating from below the chipset heatsink. Even with the lights turned off, the interplay of angular lines and bare metal makes the Prime stand out.
Liquid adornments are complemented by comprehensive fan speed controls capable of managing a full system’s cooling through a single intuitive interface. Our FanXpert intelligence can now adjust each fan’s speed based on the hottest input from a group of configurable sensors, including the GPU diode on compatible graphics cards. This allows the cooling to react to a range of different workloads, like gaming binges that turn your graphics card into a space heater, and complex rendering that lights up all the cores on your CPU. Three SafeSlots offer plenty of capacity for multiple graphics cards, and you still get a fourth slot linked to the CPU. Each of those has a dedicated connection, with no sharing between them, and the same is true for the PCIe pathways for storage. The primary M.2 slot shares a heatsink with the chipset to lower drive temperatures under load, and the secondary slot protrudes outward near the DIMM slots, where drives can be cooled by airflow from adjacent system and radiator fans. Factor in the U.2 port, and you’ve got a solid recipe for future SSD expansion or loading up from the start. With so much bandwidth inside the platform, we had to give our X399 motherboards lots of ultra-fast connectivity to reach outside the box. For external devices, USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports provide 10Gbps links in all the flavors: Type-A, Type-C, and front panel. The Gigabit networking uses reliable Intel controllers, and that’s just the start. The ROG Zenith Extreme takes networking up a notch with not only a wired 10G Ethernet card, but also a wireless 802.11ad module.
The second controller worth mentioning is the updated ASMedia ASM3142 controller, providing USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) functionality to motherboards that need more USB 3.1g2. Originally we saw the ASM1142 single lane controller, while the ASM2142 integrated a dual lane design such that all the ports had peak bandwidth when multiple ports are in use. ASM3142 is a low powered version of the ASM2142, but still supporting all the ports at peak bandwidth. A big takeawayfrom our AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1950X review is the increase in CPU connected PCIe 3.0 lanes. A full 60 lanes are available to the PCIe slots and M.2 drives, while 4 lanes head off to the chipset where it's muxed for USB, SATA, low-level I/O, and other features. The increase in CPU PCIe lanes is set up to allowfor a lot more flexibilityconnecting devices usingPCIe bandwidth.
Best X399 Motherboards
As part of the launch, AMD is wanting to promote the different ways in which an X399 motherboard could be arranged depending on the workload requirements. X399 Potential Configurations Threadripper CPUs reserve four PCIe lanes for the chipset, which similar to Intel acts like a PCIe switch for more IO - although AMD only offers a few lanes here compared to Intel's 24 PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes. Threadripper has enough PCIe to easily connect multiple NVMe SSDs directly to the CPU. But it’s not enough to just have a bunch of M.2 slots. The fastest SSDs can heat up under heavy sustained loads, causing performance to drop when you need it the most. To improve thermals, the M.2s on all of our X399 motherboards are either covered by heatsinks or positioned so that drives are in the path of airflow. On top of that, the boards come with U.2 ports for the cabled NVMe SSDs derived from data centers.
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