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. 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. Each of these potential configurations would run into several thousand dollars a piece for a full build - the M.2 drives were suggested at 512GB minimum, with the SATA drives in RAID configurations as well. AMD is making no joke; they want to be the premium platform. New Controllers for X399 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.

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: With each of these motherboard overviews, we like to cover a few of the newer controllers to hit the market that motherboard manufacturers might take advantage of. Given the recent X299 launch on the Intel side, not much has changed since. The big parts to enter the consumer space are Aquantia's multi-gigabit ethernet controllers. 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. All-new for this generation, the Zenith Extreme is the flagship of ROG’s AMD motherboard lineup. It comes with all of our latest features, including innovations available only on a select group of top-of-the-line models.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. AMD X399 AORUS Motherboard with 10+3 IR Digital PWM, Dual Intel ® GbE LAN + AQUANTIA ® 10GbE BASE-T LAN, Triple M.2 with Triple Thermal Guard, ALC1220-VB + ESS 9118 Audio, Intel ® Dual Band 802.11ac WIFI, NanoCarbon Base Plated and I/O Shield Armor, RGB FUSION 2.0 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.

Ready for cooling in any form, the diverse collection of liquid and fan headers lets you run everything from off-the-shelf AiOs to custom loops. With eight 4-pin headers in total, there’s enough capacity to cover an entire build. Supports AMD 2 nd Generation Ryzen™ Threadripper™ and 1 st Generation Ryzen™ Threadripper™ ProcessorsThe 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. This is a powerful step up from the previous X399 GIGABYTE Aorus 7 motherboard to make up for its shortcomings with a more beefy VRM set up of 10+3 with a load of features increased to a certain degree compared to its predecessor. There are four PCI-e slots, a bunch of M.2 drives, 8 DIMM slots, integrated WiFi, RGB, and many more. It would have been better if they boarded the latest WiFi on it, still, it is not a fatal blow to the worth. On the upside, it has a pair of Gigabit Intel NICs and a 10 gigabit LAN Aquantia, it improves your internal networking for your router and whatnot, which comes pretty costly if you buy it separately 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.

The days when PCs looked dull and boring are long behind us. Today’s best DIY rigs are works of functional art in their own right, and our trendsetting styling continues to evolve with the times. The ROG and Prime interpretations of X399 present distinctive monochromatic themes that combine clean lines with a neutral canvas for customizable lighting. 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”. 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.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