AMD has RYZEN!!

[NeoGen]

The new Ryzen processors are out for pre-order and shipping in March 2nd... unfortunately I blinked and the 1800X is already out of stock on most retailers. I may have to wait a little for re-stocking.
Oh well... I also have to pick a good X370 motherboard to go along with it

Anyone here managed to snag one?

[vaughan]

Not yet, I'm looking at the tier 2 motherboards for example, Asus Prime B350M-A, as it is (1) cheaper and (2) I don't need fancy sound hardware for a cruncher.

[NeoGen]

I'm looking to replace my primary computer in which I work, play, listen to music, etc, as well as crunching, so I'm looking for a good X370 motherboard to last me a very long time. Fill it with 64Gb of RAM and an upcoming Vega GPU, and I should be set.

Will be eager to see what they have to offer once the server parts come out, especially the 32core Naples

[Dirk Broer]

There are at the moment few Ryzen CPU out, but what has been presented can be ompared to Intel's i7 line.
The main focus of the motherboards seems to be geared likewise.

Now when it comes to crunching there are different approaches.
One is to do it on a server with as many cores as possible, so that one (or two) PSU will be able to run all, making things economically affordable 24/7. Costs an arm and a leg though.
A mobo with two or four of those 32-cores is the best here, but I would even settle for a mobo with just one 32-core. So far these CPUs are not yet brought out, and what i've seen of them doesn't look like Socket AM4 will suit them.

The other end of the spectrum is to have CPUs that require very little power to run them, like the present AM1 platform. As this platform uses SOCs (having their chipset on the same silicon that also houses the CPU and the IGP), there seems nothing to prevent AMD from continuing to bring out Zen-based AM1 SOCs (or even ARM-based AM1 SOCs!). So far these CPUs have not been brought out either, and nothing indicates that they ever will.

What do we have?


It looks like the X370 boards will best fit NeoGen's needs while Vaughan might settle for multiple boards with a lesser chipset, as long as they will house a 8-core/16-thread cruncher with 64 GB of RAM, a fast SSD and a GPU.

[Dirk Broer]

Asrock AM4

Asrock has two top models, the Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming being the most elaborate and expensive (329 Euro's here) one, specially meant for gamers.
The slightly less expensive (279 Euro's here) X370 Taichi only misses out on the second 5 GB ethernet port of the X370 Professional Gaming.
Looking at the presently cheapest boards (those with the B350 chipset), I noticed that the AM-350M and AB350M-HDV are limited to CPUs with a TDP of respectively 95 and 65 Watt and both only support two sticks of RAM (up to 32 GB with two 16 GB modules), Asrock claiming that you may use DDR4 2400/2133 ECC & non-ECC, un-buffered memory in this case (ECC & non-ECC not at the same time I guess). The more expensive boards support up to 2667 MHz RAM, but not four sticks in all four slots at that speed.

[NeoGen]

Sounds like a very good motherboard but one the awkward things for me is that Aquantia 5Gbps ethernet, it probably requires a specialized router or switch, otherwise it will default to 1Gbps as the other port. I'm so sad it's 2017, 10+ years since IEEE certified 10Gbps ethernet and its still not widespread and affordable.
I was looking through and I can't find anywhere where it says it will use the ECC feature on ECC RAM, several others I've looked into said they are compatible with ECC RAM but the ECC feature is disabled, ASUS doesn't say if it uses or not the ECC feature, not even on the manual, I'm inclined to believe that like others they will accept it but keep ECC feature disabled and just run as normal RAM. I find it sad that that's something not widespread on high end motherboards yet too.

Also another hope I had for this new set of motherboards would be for them to have a thunderbolt 3 port, so that we could plug in one of those external GPU housings. May just have to see if some of those PCIe thunderbolt 3 internal cards would do it. Would be great to have a couple of GPUs housed outside the case as I have difficulty keeping the temperature inside my old mid-ATX case cool enough. I just keep it running open pretty much the whole time, summer temperatures especially used to cause blue screens.

[Dirk Broer]

As the 5GB ethernet port looks to me like a real LAN-party gamer gadget, I'd go for their Taichi if I'd want to buy Asrock,
though their far cheaper X370 Killer SLI and X370 Killer SLI/ac (with WiFi) are still very capable boards and also support ECC.
I will try to find out whether the Asrock boards will also use the ECC feature.

On our facebook page I've placed links to all AM4 board manufacturers.

[Dirk Broer]

ASUS AM4

When I compare the most expensive ASUS board, the ROG Crosshair VI Hero, with the cheapest (so far), the Prime B350M-A
I can actually 'hear' Vaughan saying "I'm looking at the tier 2 motherboards for example, Asus Prime B350M-A, as it is (1) cheaper and (2) I don't need fancy sound hardware for a cruncher.",
as the Prime B350M-A has all you need to crunch and for a good deal less money than the gamer-oriented ROG Crosshair (which seems -here- the cheapest 'X370 Gamer board' at 269 Euro's).
No mentioning of support for ECC RAM with ASUS.

[vaughan]

I'm tempted to buy a Ryzen next week but the DDR4 ram prices, even for only 2x16GB sticks, are pretty steep.
CPU = dear
mobo = cheap
ram = crazy prices
case for uATX mobo - cheap (sub $100)
p/s = acceptable (depends what Wattage you get)
GPU = optional (could wait for GTX1080 Ti)
replacing a Q6600 that is 10 years old and too power inefficient now.

[Dirk Broer]

My plan is to re-use case and PSU, possibly even GPU.
Costs for mobo+8 core+DDR4 are staggering though.