Monday, January 11th 2021
AMD WRX80 Threadripper PRO Platform Breaks From OEM Shackles, ASUS WS WRX80 SAGE Spotted
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 PRO line of ultra high-end processors with 8-channel DDR4 memory and 128-lane PCI-Express were a bit of a nothingburger for the DIY PC community as AMD made it exclusive to Lenovo for its ThinkStation P620 pre-built workstations. The hope for Threadripper PRO hitting the DIY scene increased in December 2020, with GIGABYTE unveiling a the WRX80 SU8, a motherboard sold in the open market, albeit designed mainly for servers and not workstations that are loaded with I/O. ASUS is about to change this.
Here's the first picture of the ASUS WS WRX80 SAGE, a no-holes-barred workstation motherboard based on the AMD WRX80 chipset, supporting Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3000 series processors. This board wires out each of the processor's eight memory channels to its own DIMM slot (1 DIMM per channel), and spreads the processor's lavish PCIe 4.0 lane budget among seven PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slots, three onboard (and possibly four by AIC) M.2 NVMe slots, a pair of U.2 NVMe slots, and I/O that very likely includes a pair of 10 GbE connections. Getting the board is the easy part. You'll need to hunt down a Ryzen Threadripper PRO sWRX80 processor, and a PSU that can feed the board's three 8-pin EPS, and two 6-pin PCIe, besides the 24-pin ATX.
Source:
VideoCardz
Here's the first picture of the ASUS WS WRX80 SAGE, a no-holes-barred workstation motherboard based on the AMD WRX80 chipset, supporting Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3000 series processors. This board wires out each of the processor's eight memory channels to its own DIMM slot (1 DIMM per channel), and spreads the processor's lavish PCIe 4.0 lane budget among seven PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slots, three onboard (and possibly four by AIC) M.2 NVMe slots, a pair of U.2 NVMe slots, and I/O that very likely includes a pair of 10 GbE connections. Getting the board is the easy part. You'll need to hunt down a Ryzen Threadripper PRO sWRX80 processor, and a PSU that can feed the board's three 8-pin EPS, and two 6-pin PCIe, besides the 24-pin ATX.
24 Comments on AMD WRX80 Threadripper PRO Platform Breaks From OEM Shackles, ASUS WS WRX80 SAGE Spotted
8-channel memory and 128 PCIe lanes were the differentiating factor between regular Threadripper (4 ch RAM, 64 PCIe lanes) and Epyc before, if I remember correctly. Why not just get an Epyc workstation?
I feel like I'm missing something.
24 hour seven days a week one the ground technical support
You are missing the fact that EPYC can not have almost ANY downtime
You are missing the fact that EPYC needs to be 99.999 percent UP..
Sure, you can buy a 1P EPYC if you don't need all the cores. They're pretty much just Threadrippers tuned for the efficiency sweet spot instead of the performance sweet spot. Also, TR4 and SP3 sockets are incompatible, so if you want to use the features of a server board, you can't just buy a Threadripper.
In terms of pricing, there's almost no difference. List pricing for the EPYC 7702P is within 10% of the list pricing for a 3990X - both 64C single-socket Zen2.
I only wish it didn't have that chipset fan.
These kind of boards should of been made for TR from the start!
In all seriousness, if they are buffers, they maintain the stability of whatever signals are going through them, be it the PCIe clock alone or any of the data lines. All signals degrade the further they travel which gets worse at higher frequencies and there may be crosstalk between the lanes, so this might be to buffer the signals to the slots furthest away from the CPU to prevent errors and maintain signal integrity. I've seen these on most motherboards with a lot of PCIe lanes.
I'd still just prefer a much bigger heatsink.
...no-holds-barred...
I'm just nitpicking.
The reason this board is beautiful is because it's naked engineering, all function, no gimmicks - and the mesh cover is just about the only thing that isn't essential.