TR4 Motherboards

[Dirk Broer]

The platform of choice for 'heavy' AMD crunchers at this moment is the Ryzen Threadripper on Socket TR4.
What is the offering? What mobo's offers the best value for money? What to look out for?

We start with Asrock, in the next posts in this thread we will see ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI. No TR4 board yet from Biostar, AFAIK.

Asrock has two boards to offer, one aimed at gamers and a less RGB-based board, the X399 Taichi that gets my recommendation.

Board	Fatal1ty X399 Professional Gaming	X399 Taichi
Picture (click for bigger picture)
Power Phases	11	11
RAM	128GB, up to 3600+MHz	128GB, up to 3600+MHz
ECC support	Yes	Yes
Audio	Realtek ALC1220	Realtek ALC1220
LAN	1x 10 Gigabit Aquantia AQC107 2x 1 Gigabit Intel I211AT	2x 1 Gigabit Intel I211AT
WiFi	802.11a/b/g/n/ac Dual-Band	802.11a/b/g/n/ac Dual-Band
Bluetooth	4.2	4.2
PCIe	4x PCIe 3.0 x16 Slots 1 x PCI Express 2.0 x1	4x PCIe 3.0 x16 Slots 1 x PCI Express 2.0 x1
SATA	8x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s	8x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s
M2	3x	3x
U2	1x	1x
USB	2 USB 3.1 Gen2 10Gb/s (1 Type-A + 1 Type-C), 12 USB 3.1 Gen1 (4 Front, 8 Rear) 4x USB 2.0	2 USB 3.1 Gen2 10Gb/s (1 Type-A + 1 Type-C), 12 USB 3.1 Gen1 (4 Front, 8 Rear) 4x USB 2.0
Format	ATX	ATX
Fan headers	5x 4-pin	5x 4-pin
Newegg Price	$439.99	$339.99
mwave.com.au Price	AU$699.00	AU$549.00
CCL Computer UK	£444.99	£301.10

Both support NVMe SSD as boot disks.
N.B. for both: If the U2 Connector is plugged in, the M2_1 connector will be disabled!