Re: [trinity-users] New Motherboard Opinions

On Mon, 24 Aug 2020 11:54:13 -0400 "BorgLabs - Kate Draven" <borglabs4(a)gmail.com> wrote: I have a Threadripper 1900X (that's the early, low-end 8-core/16-thread offering that they dropped for later generations) and an ASUS Prime X399-A motherboard. That's a TR4 socket board, so if you're buying a 3rd generation Threadripper, you don't want that exact board—you'll need a TRX4 socket instead. I've never worked with Gigabyte boards specifically, so I can't comment on their build quality. ASUS sometimes has better reviews, but the difference seems small. Even low-end Threadripper boards should be fairly well tricked out (in both useful and non-useful ways—I didn't really *want* those RGB LEDs . . .). The first thing I would consider is how many M.2/NVMe and SATA slots you need, and how many PCIe add-on board slots, because there's sometimes a tradeoff there. I notice that Gigabyte's site doesn't tell you how many plain SATA drives the boards accommodate (newegg gives 8xSATA for the Gigabyte Aorus Master). The second thing I'd look at is how many of which kind of onboard USB headers the board has (2.0 VS 3 VS 3 with USB-C), and how many you need, keeping in mind that each header may support multiple ports. The Gigabyte boards have built in WLAN—is this a feature you want? Otherwise they seem superficially similar to my non-WLAN ASUS board, with Realtek hi-def audio and Intel LAN chipsets . . . but there's one more thing you need to be careful of. While I'm not sure it's still true in this generation, many early Threadripper boards like mine use specific variants of the it87 sensor chip that are only supported under Linux by an unmaintained out-of-tree kernel driver that has to be specially loaded to suppress an ACPI conflict. Without a working driver for that chip, you can't get fan information. It's possible that doesn't matter to you, of course. Overall, my Threadripper's always run cool (~30C is typical, ~60C if I'm compiling OpenOffice or something, and I've never seen it break 70C). That's in a large, moderately well-ventilated case with an unexceptional CPU fan. Hope that helps in some way. E. Liddell ---------------------------------------------------------------------