W790 Motherboard discussion thread

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c3l3x

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May 1, 2020
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I got really excited about the Asus boards, especially after seeing this overclocking video. But, I can't understand why they omitted USB4/TB4. A lot of creative professionals like myself will be interested in these for their workstations, but we depend on TB devices including storage, video monitoring, audio decks, etc. It looks like neither of the Asus boards have a TB header. Is there any way to add USB4/TB4 as an add-in card? If so, I'm guessing that it will cost a lot
 
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heromode

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May 25, 2020
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I agree, for these outrageous prices, the lack of TB4 is not acceptable. On the other hand, the large amount of pcie5 lanes enables a user to add most things using AIC's

just a quick search revealed the ASRock Thunderbolt 4 AIC, PCIe 3.0 x4, almost 100 EUR in Europe, but when the mobo is around $1000, what does any price mean anymore? :(

edit: that ASRock cards seem to need a bunch of connector cables to motherboard headers.. sry, might be totally unusable.. It's a mess!

edit2: quick glance even the ASRock W790 motherboard doesn't support that AIC card. With these prices i'm quickly turning from a fanboy into a hater of these W790 boards. I mean do they really think they can just double the prices of the motherboard with each chipset generation now? Are the next gen motherboards gonna go for $2500?

It's just ridiculous. I'm keeping my C246 motherboard.
 
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c3l3x

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I honestly don't know what's going with these W790 motherboards either. It's like they couldn't decide if they should be HEDT or pure workstation/server boards. So on the Asus boards you have no USB4/TB, no Wifi, etc. But then they included overclocking features. So, which is it? And I agree that for $900-1300 for a motherboard, it should be fully featured. Heck, you can get a $400 mini PC with USB4/TB.

I'm also thinking that maybe the best bet is to wait. Maybe better boards will come out, or maybe Threadripper 7000 with a proper HEDT option in September worth the wait. It's only six months away.
 
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heromode

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May 25, 2020
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updated some prices, the Supermicro X13SWA-TF now has a "sane" offer on newegg
removed the ECC rdimm links, there are Samsung and Micron ECC DDR5 offerings on newegg, presumably they will work (?)

Micron MTC20F2085S1RC48BA1
Samsung M321R8GA0BB0-CQK
Samsung M321R2GA3BB6-CQK

etc...
 
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Negative Entropy

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May 20, 2020
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Watching this - looking to build a CFD solver on this platform (8 channel RAM). Hopefully reviews start to drop soon since the mainboards are out and I think the CPUs are supposed to be available this month.

I agree the pricing is getting really silly. I know you need a bunch of mainboard layers to keep signal integrity for PCIe slots, and it gets worse the further from the CPU socket, but I can't but help there's some excessive profit seeking in here as well (which we've seen more and more of since the pandemic hit).

I really don't want to wait on Threadripper 7000 - I like any platform to have time to stabilize, and this one has been running in the background for quite a few months already.

That said, a lot of the performance impact for my application is a function of frequency scaling. I will be very interested in how these CPUs maintain their frequency as more cores are used.

I did get a quote from BOXX on their W-3400 platform - 3435X, 128GB RAM (8 sticks), rackmount - price was almost $12k. I know they use all top of the line stuff, but I don't think support is worth that much over retail.
 
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twin_savage

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Jan 26, 2018
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I'm going to be building a w3400 workstation for mhd problems which are fairly similar to cfd, but more memory heavy.
I've already got the sage mb and the water block for it, just waiting on ram and cpu availability.

I decided not to wait for threadripper 7000 because its going to have it's memory channels reduced by 50% as compared to a full genoa all while running at only jedec speed.
 
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Bert

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Mar 31, 2018
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Has anyone had a chance to build a system with w790 yet? I am curious if we can stick one of xeon sapphire rapids CPU on those motherboards
 
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RolloZ170

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Apr 24, 2016
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Bert said:
I am curious if we can stick one of xeon sapphire rapids CPU on those motherboards
Click to expand...
not tested but this should NOT work:
edit: Supposedly a SPR-SP runs on a W790 motherboard

SPR-SP CPU->PCH-C741 DMI3x8(used only x4 on current boards )
SPR-MAX CPU->PCH-C741 DMI3x8
SPR-WS CPU->PCH-W790 DMI4x8

i have tested the other way: Xeon w3-2423 on C741 board was not working.
edit: the reason may be that w3-2423 supports only 64 PCIe lanes, X13SEI uses 80 lanes.
 
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Bert

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Well that's a bummer, I guess x99 is the last platform where we can interchange xeon server cpus with workstation/dekstop HEDT cpus.

It is such a waste to lock CPUs to a specific platform and worse to a vendor.


RolloZ170 said:
not tested but this should NOT work:

SPR-SP CPU->PCH-C741 DMI3x4
SPR-WS CPU->PCH-W790 DMI4x8

tested the other way: Xeon w3-2423 on C741 board was not working.
Click to expand...
 
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Ivan Dimitrov

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Jul 10, 2016
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RolloZ170 said:
not tested but this should NOT work:

SPR-SP CPU->PCH-C741 DMI3x4
SPR-WS CPU->PCH-W790 DMI4x8

tested the other way: Xeon w3-2423 on C741 board was not working.
Click to expand...
Sorry but I think you are not correct. The Xeon CPUs also have DMI4x8. This doesn't mean the Xeons will be supported though. Most likely there will be some stupid SW lock on BIOS level. None of the boards list the server Xeons as supported. Maybe we some "resourceful" Chinese sellers on eBay might offer unlocks :rolleyes:.


Pic
 
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twin_savage

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It was my understanding that the SPR Xeon W's are going to start with the same exact MCC and XCC dies as SPR-SP, but that different functional blocks will be enabled and disabled, making the processors different enough that they aren't compatible. XCC SPR-WS has 112 PCIe lanes while SPR-SP only has 80, seems reasonable to me that they aren't compatible.

The XMP R-DIMMs need to hurry and be released for the platform already, its looking like the good kits aren't even going to be released this month. G.Skill is supposed to have a 6400MHz 256GB kit for the platform coming, F5-6400R3239G32GE8-ZR5K, though I can't find any mention of it online yet.
 
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MichalPL

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Feb 10, 2019
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first results of the Intel Xeon w9-3475X - slightly slower than predicted


Intel Xeon w9-3475X - 65891 points!

Single Thread Rating: 3678


AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5995WX - 96892

Single Thread Rating: 3316


AMD EPYC 9654 - 126045

Single Thread Rating: 2926


Intel Core i9-13900KS - 62475

Single Thread Rating: 4802

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X - 63581

Single Thread Rating: 4324
 
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Bert

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A 36 core CPU cannot beat 16 core 7950X? How can integer score of 7950x be higher than w9 given the core count benefit?
 
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MichalPL

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Feb 10, 2019
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Bert said:
A 36 core CPU cannot beat 16 core 7950X? How can integer score of 7950x be higher than w9 given the core count benefit?
Click to expand...
Yes, this is a bad thing :/ slow in multi-core

Good thing is it finally the fastest single core performance CPU (still like Ryzen 5900X) with massive number of PCIe lanes.

so in short... maybe fast enough to build ZFS NAS based on NVMe PCIe 4.0 who can saturate 2x 100GbE when copy 1 large file, but probably still too slow... (on i9 you a do it but just 3 NVMe and RAID0, not 16).

My dream is 13900kf/ks with ~80pcie lanes ;) Maybe just boards with PLX PCIe 5.0 chip ?
 
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