Motherboards News - Page 6

With the official announcement and release of the new Comet Lake CPU's, we can now showcase all of the new Z490 boards made for the new up to 10 Core mainstream processors from Intel. Today we look at the offerings from ASUS and what they have to offer.

ROG Maximus Series

First up is the Maximus series, which signifies the peak of engineering and performance form ASUS. If you are looking for an ASUS board with the latest and greatest features, the Maximus lineup is where you should start.

Maximus XII Extreme

The Maximus XII Extreme is the peak top of the top-end series of boards for ASUS. While the Extreme used to be the top XOC board (That title now rests with the APEX models), it now has become the board with everything including the kitchen sink included and is well-targeted for extreme enthusiasts.

AMD rocked the CPU world with its Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor, packing an insane 64 cores and 128 threads of Zen 2 goodness -- but it took ASRock's awesome TRX40 Taichi motherboard to crank that CPU right up to the now world record 5748.66MHz.

It wasn't just the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X frequency world record that ASRock bagged with its TRX40 Taichi motherboard, but instead a total of 5 world records. The wPrime-1024M new record is 11sec 541ms by SPLAVE using the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor, while also setting the GPUPI for CPU 1B record with 21 sec 622ms.

SPLAVE also smashed the Cinebench R20 benchmark record using AMD's flagship Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor and ASRock TRX40 Taichi motherboard with 39,518 marks. Geekbench 3's multi-core benchmark didn't have any relief from SPLAVE's domination with the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X pushing a huge 293,771 points while finishing off his benchmark domination smashing the HWBOT x265 benchmark record at 1080p with 384.389FPS.

ASUS has just taken the wraps off of its beyond-enthusiast flagship TRX40 motherboard, introducing the new ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha which packs just about everything apart from the kitchen sink.

The new ASUS ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha motherboard has been designed to house the ridiculous AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor, packing an equally insane 64 cores and 128 threads of CPU power. The board has some crazy amounts of power coursing through its veins (or is that PCB) with ASUS packing in 3 x power connectors: 8+8+6-pin PCIe power connectors are required on the ASUS ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha motherboard.

ASUS supports up to 256GB of RAM on the board with up to 4733MHz supported, 4 x PCIe 4.0 x16 slots and a huge 5 x Gen 4 M.2 slots for mass amounts of ridiculously fast storage. Speaking of mass amounts of ridiculously fast storage, ASUS includes support for its new Hyper M.2 x16 Gen 4 card which will open up the flood gates to an insane 15 x M.2 drives supported on the ASUS ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha motherboard. If that wasn't enough, you've also got 8 x SATA III ports and a slew of USB ports all across the board.

Intel will be launching its new Comet Lake-S processors in April 2020 according to the latest rumors, a new CPU family that will launch alongside the Z490 chipset and a slew of new motherboards.

The new Z490 chipset will reportedly be joined by the W480, B460, and H410 which will be destined for the workstation, business, and entry-level markets, respectively. The new flagship Z490 chipset would go hand-in-hand with the new Comet Lake-S processors which will arrive with up to 10C/20T, yet it'll still only offer PCIe 3.0 versus PCIe 4.0 offered on AMD's new X570 chipset.

Intel will be introducing a new socket with Comet Lake-S, with the new LGA 1200 socket offering 49 additional pins over the LGA 1151 socket. The new LGA 1200 socket will NOT be backwards compatible with previous-gen CPUs. But, previous-gen coolers should work, something we'll know more about next year.

Now that AMD's new third-gen Ryzen Threadripper CPUs are official, motherboards makers are unveiling their boards -- one of the first is ASRock and two new TRX40-based motherboards in the Creator and Taichi families.

ASRock's new TRX40 Creator motherboard is made for content creators that want a super-smooth, and ridiculously fast third-gen Ryzen Threadripper system. ASRock is positioning the new TRX40 Creator motherboard at creators who want to throw in crazy-fast NVIDIA Quadro RTX graphics cards and super-fast PCIe 4.0-based storage.

Included in ASRock's new TRX40 Creator motherboard is 10GbE networking courtesy of AQUANTIA's AQtion 10Gbps BASE-T Ethernet controller, which will offer incredibly fast network transfers. Pair this board up with a crazy-core-count third-gen Ryzen Threadripper CPU, some Quadro RTX graphics cards, PCIe 4.0 storage and 10GbE networking and you have quite the content powerhouse.

AMD is still in the kitchen cooking up its next-gen Ryzen Threadripper CPUs based on the exciting and kick-ass Zen 2 architecture, but what about motherboards to support them? We know about the new sockets in TRX40/TRX80/WRX80 that will support 24C/32C/48C/64C next-gen chips from AMD.

VideoCardz has the scoop here of a next-gen AORUS TRX40 motherboard on the E-ATX standard (i.e. it's chunky AF) and packs 4 x PCIe 4.0 x16 ports, and 8 x DDR4 DIMM slots for quad-channel memory goodness. There's a chipset fan to keep it cool, and a debug LED that can be spotted from this single, mysterious image.

You can see there is a bunch of fin arrays near the CPU socket, which would point to the third-gen Ryzen Threadripper CPUs chewing through copious amounts of power. Given that the new Zen 2-based Ryzen Threadripper CPUs will have up to 64C/128T and up to 280W TDPs, this is no surprise.

If you thought the prospect of China getting spy chips into major US companies and their systems and networks through Supermicro motherboards seeing the company reportedly being infiltrated by members of China's People's Liberation Army was bad, well you ain't seen nothing yet.

A new story is emerging that this entire spy chip game can be done much cheaper, according to Monta Elkins who works with Foxguard as a "hacker-in-chief". Elkins will be presenting his discovery and work at the CS3sthlm security conference later this month, where using a $2 chip found on a Digismark Arduino he could hack and take over a Cisco ASA 5505 firewall server.

Elkins explained to Wired: "We think this stuff is so magical, but it's not really that hard. By showing people the hardware, I wanted to make it much more real. It's not magical. It's not impossible. I could do this in my basement. And there are lots of people smarter than me, and they can do it for almost nothing".

Intel has caught a lot of heat for the tactic of refresh after refresh of virtually similar CPUs. Just to making minuscule changes such as TIM to solder change and minor clock speed bumps as demonstrated by the initial X299 CPUs 7XXX to 9XXX series parts. Users have scoffed at the 14nm+++++++++++++++++++ as many have put it due to Intel struggling for years with the 10nm node.

Well, today, Intel's complacency and practices may have come along to bite them in the ass thoroughly. As seen on Intel's own support article page the inclusion of the new microcode for support of the new Cascade Lake-X parts will remove compatibility for the dual channel X299 based bretheren, the Kaby Lake-X.

The internet has been ablaze with the recent update from AMD in regards to both the 3950X and the upcoming third-gen Threadripper, or Threadripper 3000. We know that the top end AM4 CPU consisting of 16 cores and 32 threads, along with the HEDT platform of Ryzen 3000 Threadripper reaching an unknown, but potentially 64 cores on a single package will see the official light of day coming in November which is a mere month away.

The eagle-eyed among enthusiasts such as the team from Videocardz noticed an update from MSI on their promotional review program page. It has been recently updated to list a new model in the register for eligible products for the promotion, the Creator TRX40.

One takeaway from this listing is that the "Creation" moniker which was applied to Z390, X570, X399, and X299 seems to be going away. It looks like the "Creation" label will be pitched aside as the new Creator X299 and TRX40 show that they may be trying to clear up the marketing and targeting message to ensure users understand these boards are made for content creators.

Intel's recent announcement of Cascade Lake-X processors and the coming massive price drop, you can bet there will be a much higher HEDT demand this time around. With the 18 core unit dropping from $2000 to sub $1000, you can bet that the X299 platform just became far more obtainable for a large part of the enthusiasts market.

GIGABYTE has released the newest in their X299 lineup, labeled the X299X series. Don't let the name fool you; all of the same parts are still in place with the chipset backbone being X299. Beyond that, GIGABYTE worked to improve connectivity and capability of their X299 based parts in the new X299X offerings.

All of the X299X offerings feature the same 70A power stages for power delivery to ensure you can push all of the new Cascade Lake-X CPU's to the limit of your cooling. These boards also enhance the memory capability and support in lockstep with the new CPU's supporting up to 256GB DDR4.