The AMD Threadripper 2 Teaser: Pre-Orders Start Today, Up to 32 Cores
by Ian Cutress on August 6, 2018 9:00 AM ESTX399 Motherboards: The MSI X399 Creation
For the motherboard situation, AMD clarified that all motherboards on the market today will be able to run the new 250W processors. The differences will be in how well each motherboard will be able to overclock, with AMD citing that the newer models and revisions should perform better, given that they were built with a higher power rating already in mind. Boards like the X399 Creation should also help in pushing the first generation Ryzen Threadripper.
Box. Has board inside.
As noted back at Computex, the MSI X399 Creation is a very visually busy motherboard. Lots of angles, and lots of shades of grey. I know it is customary in some Asian languages and magazines to be very dense, and this is kind of what that looks like. Most of the time I prefer a simpler, elegant design. This design does not scream elegance.
The key headline for this motherboard is the power delivery. MSI has put 16 phases on the processor, and another three for "uncore" portion of the chip, or as AMD calls it, the SoC. In order to fit them in, the DRAM slots are slightly further down than average, but it also allows MSI to put in a larger heatsink, which also connects to the heatsink near the rear panel of the board.
In case you forget the name: Creation.
Storage on the motherboard comes in two forms: eight SATA ports, and seven M.2 drives. That is not a typo: MSI has enabled this motherboard with seven M.2 slots. Three come from on the board, and are found under the chipset heatsink. Here are two of them:
The other four comes from an add-in PCIe card. We also saw this at Computex, and it uses a dual-slot design. It looks like a GPU:
But inside are four M.2 slots, with thermal pad on the heatsink to assist with cooling.
MSI states that this was built specifically with Threadripper in mind, so I’m going to annoy our SSD reviewer, Billy Tallis, to hand over a few more drives.
Also on the board is an extensive rear panel, with USB 3.1 ports, USB 3.0 ports, Ethernet, and Wi-Fi:
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Sttm - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
The lack of an edit button strikes me again.smilingcrow - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
Don't buy a new sports car either because in 12 months time it will have depreciated and there may be faster models. ;)TR2 pricing goes much higher than TR1 so who knows how much TR3 chips will cost next year and how many cores they will have.
These are for hobbyists when not bought for work and some hobbies are expensive if you aim high.
PeachNCream - Tuesday, August 7, 2018 - link
Car analogies don't work very well in this situation as the car industry is relatively slow to change compared to even the maturing and subsequently slowing pace of CPU development.rahvin - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
Until they spin the silicon and you can buy it it's not real, ask anyone that's been expecting Intel 10nm processors. Process tech is likely to stall out very soon if it hasn't already because they have hit the quantum limits on the transistor which have been frozen at 16nm for years.What I'd be more worried about going forward is all the exploits Intel is suffering with Spectre class timing attacks, we're already up to Spectre variant 11 now and Intel has been vulnerable to every variant and AMD has only been partially vulnerable to a few of them. I personally believe this is the strongest reason to migrate away from Intel until they can get some viable silicon that's not vulnerable to every possible timing exploit.
Gothmoth - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
from what i hear from a friend who does hardware vlogging.... the TR2 are great update and the benchmark numbers he saw are very good. the turbo with good cooling is higher than on paper and we will not be dispapointed when the benchmakrs go live around 15/16 of august.cpuaddicted - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
The price of 2950 in the first table is listed as 849$ whereas every where else is mentioned at 899$. Please correct.BB-5F-96-D7-AE-26 - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
Just forget about the AMD TR 1950X...mikk - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
Pathetic paper launch from AMDtsk2k - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
Which canon lake chips are you testing Ian?The 8121U?
CaedenV - Monday, August 6, 2018 - link
250W CPU?!?!?! That is epic!forget about cooling the processor... how do you keep your room cool when you are running an oven 24/7?
Still, seriously cool tech coming from AMD. Happy to see them back in action!