True for some of them for sure but a lot of the consumer boards that are aimed at the high-end overclocking are the real deal in terms of engineering. Very powerful and efficient VRMs are not cheap and a lot more overbuilt than on something like in this board so the margins are probably not as crazy high as you think (at least in the middle of the Z390 X570 market).
What overclocking are you talking about? Overclocking a 9900K from 4.7GHz stock all core turbo to 5.0GHz and look at 95C loaded temperature, or overclocking Ryzen 0.1GHz past the precision boost? You kids don't know anything about overclocking nowadays.
I will say the marketing sucks though. I don't give a fuck about an Aorus regardless of how extreme it may be and I really don't want to join a republic, thanks for asking though.
They're not exactly *asking* - the red-cloaked tide of Gamers have annexed several nearby states. For a while it looked like they'd take the Ministry of Sound, but fortunately Realtek pushed them back.
The 570 boards are expensive because they are the first PCIE4 motherboards. That and they needed a 12 layer board to get the pcie trace lengths within the spec limits. As the OEM's get more experience with 4.0 they'll drop in price but the first boards are always going be $$$ because of the additional engineering. You might not remember but the first 3.0 boards were more expensive too.
Gavin, can you comment as to why the W-3235 has a poor showing in some benchmarks, such as Ashes of the Singularity? It loses against it's older cousin, the 7900X, even though it has a slightly faster turbo, much more cache, more memory channels and the same mesh architecture.
The only thing I can think of is that the 7900X is LCC Skylake silicon while the W-3235 is HCC, but it doesn't seem that such a big delta can be explained by an extra tile hop or two.
Three reasons for the difference: 1. Looser memory timings (secondary, tertiary) on the workstation Supermicro boards compared to the enthusiast X299 ones with tighter timings. Also, likely looser primary timings (as well as looser secondary and tertiary) due to using 16GB DIMMs (and 6 of them) as opposed to 8GB DIMMS (and only 4 of them).
2. The cascade lake processors have built-in hardware mitigations that are known to have some performance impact. Sure this impact is smaller impact than equivalent software mitigations but larger impact than no security mitigations at all. The 7900X results show in the charts are likely from 2 years ago with no or fewer security mitigations applied.
3. Unlike enthusiast X299 boards that out-of-the box have no power limits and the cpu can turbo to its all-core turbo indefinitely, the Supermicro C246 boards adhere to Intel’s spec so the TDP is enforced after 28 (or so) seconds. So the 3235 in the above results was turboing to its all-core frequency (and we don’t know if it is 4GHZ as it is for the 7900X to begin with) for only 28 seconds - after that its frequency dropped to a value that would make the cpu power consumption not exceed 180W (i.e. equal to the TDP).
P.S: There is a mistake in the article. Specifically, under the Test Bed section it says that the board used was the X11SCA-W (instead of the X11SPA-T that this review is supposedly about). It also says that the RAM used was 2x16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2400 (run at 2666) which would have been the case for the X11SCA-W (mainstream 1151 socket and dual channel RAM). This board (the X11SPA-T) should have been tested with 6x16GB at 2933MHZ. Clearly the author forgot to fully update the table when he copy-pasted it from the older article about the X11SCA-W.
Nice to see how the big boys handle it. Most of my work is with mITX systems. Would be lovely to see a reasonably priced SFF mobo with more than 2 RAM slots and more than 1 nvme m.2 slot. There have been some but they’re not cheap.
This board is outside my personal needs, but I would love to see a lower-priced good quality consumer ATX board with good VRMs, no LEDs and the appearance of this workstation board at a fair price. Something tells me I wouldn't be the only potential customer. Any takers?
I don’t have prices to hand but there has been discussion that the Mac Pro is competitively priced compared to buying the same parts yourself.
As said above, if you want Apple, get the Mac Pro. If your time is valuable, get it pre-built with a support contract that probably costs an extra $5k+ (which is very worth it for commercial buyers).
I’d say only build this kind of system yourself if your time isn’t worth much - but then you wouldn’t be able to afford it - or if you have free support eg graduate students to farm it out to.
"I don’t have prices to hand but there has been discussion that the Mac Pro is competitively priced compared to buying the same parts yourself."
That's always true; BigCorps buy in bulk and therefore at lower unit cost. There's a reason Amazon is killing local stores, and that's it. Trouble is, either consumers ignore the transport cost, or Amazon eats it. So far, it's mostly the latter. (e-tail will, in due time, devolve into supplying only low volume niche products that aren't profitable to stock locally.) Also, it turns out, in recent years most (i.e. more than 50%) of Amazon's turnover is from other vendors. Don't know how much Amazon's cut is, but the notion of 'central purchasing' beating on price might not be a given.
For some mid range configurations, the price is maybe okay. But you really should not upgrade the SSD or RAM at all via Apple, as far as I know, since the prices are steep. And the entry level is 5k for an 8 core, I believe? I stand by it, if you need MacOS, get Apple, otherwise why get a product that locks you into using Intel CPUs and AMD GPUs, both of which are not the be all end all these days in performance. Apple support also seems questionable with the Pro products, compared to other companies. Plus, if you don't need MacOS, chances are you need Windows or Linux and those don't run great (at all) on the Mac Pro. And my "build it yourself" was not meant as a stict "get all the cheapest parts from 5 different vendors, then assemble it and test out all the edge cases". This isn't LTT. But not going with Apple allows you the freedom to check out all the classic workstation vendors and boutiques, look for the combination of CPU, GPU, RAM and storage that fits your needs with an OS and applications you actually use and then decide which brand you trust most and see who has competitive pricing.
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Pneumothorax - Friday, January 24, 2020 - link
I'm sure the profit margin on these is quite a bit less then ridiculously overpriced Z390 & X570 boards named after some deity...Operandi - Friday, January 24, 2020 - link
True for some of them for sure but a lot of the consumer boards that are aimed at the high-end overclocking are the real deal in terms of engineering. Very powerful and efficient VRMs are not cheap and a lot more overbuilt than on something like in this board so the margins are probably not as crazy high as you think (at least in the middle of the Z390 X570 market).airdrifting - Sunday, January 26, 2020 - link
What overclocking are you talking about? Overclocking a 9900K from 4.7GHz stock all core turbo to 5.0GHz and look at 95C loaded temperature, or overclocking Ryzen 0.1GHz past the precision boost? You kids don't know anything about overclocking nowadays.Ironchef3500 - Monday, January 27, 2020 - link
+1brucethemoose - Monday, January 27, 2020 - link
+1There is *a little* headroom in HEDT CPUs, for now...
web2dot0 - Tuesday, February 11, 2020 - link
Still remember those Celeron 300A days OC to 450MhzThe glory days of Overclocking ...
Operandi - Friday, January 24, 2020 - link
I will say the marketing sucks though. I don't give a fuck about an Aorus regardless of how extreme it may be and I really don't want to join a republic, thanks for asking though.GreenReaper - Sunday, January 26, 2020 - link
They're not exactly *asking* - the red-cloaked tide of Gamers have annexed several nearby states. For a while it looked like they'd take the Ministry of Sound, but fortunately Realtek pushed them back.Operandi - Friday, January 24, 2020 - link
Also, these comments are in reverse order cause there isn't a edit button. Oh well.....rahvin - Friday, January 24, 2020 - link
The 570 boards are expensive because they are the first PCIE4 motherboards. That and they needed a 12 layer board to get the pcie trace lengths within the spec limits. As the OEM's get more experience with 4.0 they'll drop in price but the first boards are always going be $$$ because of the additional engineering. You might not remember but the first 3.0 boards were more expensive too.SSNSeawolf - Friday, January 24, 2020 - link
Gavin, can you comment as to why the W-3235 has a poor showing in some benchmarks, such as Ashes of the Singularity? It loses against it's older cousin, the 7900X, even though it has a slightly faster turbo, much more cache, more memory channels and the same mesh architecture.The only thing I can think of is that the 7900X is LCC Skylake silicon while the W-3235 is HCC, but it doesn't seem that such a big delta can be explained by an extra tile hop or two.
olafgarten - Friday, January 24, 2020 - link
As far as I know it's most likely because AOTS uses a lot of multiprocessing and so the HCC might make a difference therePCWarrior - Monday, January 27, 2020 - link
Three reasons for the difference:1. Looser memory timings (secondary, tertiary) on the workstation Supermicro boards compared to the enthusiast X299 ones with tighter timings. Also, likely looser primary timings (as well as looser secondary and tertiary) due to using 16GB DIMMs (and 6 of them) as opposed to 8GB DIMMS (and only 4 of them).
2. The cascade lake processors have built-in hardware mitigations that are known to have some performance impact. Sure this impact is smaller impact than equivalent software mitigations but larger impact than no security mitigations at all. The 7900X results show in the charts are likely from 2 years ago with no or fewer security mitigations applied.
3. Unlike enthusiast X299 boards that out-of-the box have no power limits and the cpu can turbo to its all-core turbo indefinitely, the Supermicro C246 boards adhere to Intel’s spec so the TDP is enforced after 28 (or so) seconds. So the 3235 in the above results was turboing to its all-core frequency (and we don’t know if it is 4GHZ as it is for the 7900X to begin with) for only 28 seconds - after that its frequency dropped to a value that would make the cpu power consumption not exceed 180W (i.e. equal to the TDP).
P.S: There is a mistake in the article. Specifically, under the Test Bed section it says that the board used was the X11SCA-W (instead of the X11SPA-T that this review is supposedly about). It also says that the RAM used was 2x16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2400 (run at 2666) which would have been the case for the X11SCA-W (mainstream 1151 socket and dual channel RAM). This board (the X11SPA-T) should have been tested with 6x16GB at 2933MHZ. Clearly the author forgot to fully update the table when he copy-pasted it from the older article about the X11SCA-W.
Tomatotech - Friday, January 24, 2020 - link
Nice to see how the big boys handle it. Most of my work is with mITX systems. Would be lovely to see a reasonably priced SFF mobo with more than 2 RAM slots and more than 1 nvme m.2 slot. There have been some but they’re not cheap.eastcoast_pete - Friday, January 24, 2020 - link
This board is outside my personal needs, but I would love to see a lower-priced good quality consumer ATX board with good VRMs, no LEDs and the appearance of this workstation board at a fair price. Something tells me I wouldn't be the only potential customer. Any takers?Foeketijn - Sunday, January 26, 2020 - link
I even emailed them to ask for a bullet proof no nonsense AM4 board (with official ECC support).otherwise - Tuesday, February 25, 2020 - link
The Asus "WS" boards are directly aimed at this market.watersb - Saturday, January 25, 2020 - link
Wow. Do I build one of these, or go for the Mac Pro?Licky McShmickletips - Saturday, January 25, 2020 - link
Please allow me to correct a small error in your postulation:"Do I build -two- of these, or buy one Mac Pro equivalent?"
Death666Angel - Saturday, January 25, 2020 - link
Do you need MacOS? Go with Apple. Do you just need a good workstation? Build it yourself. :)Tomatotech - Saturday, January 25, 2020 - link
I don’t have prices to hand but there has been discussion that the Mac Pro is competitively priced compared to buying the same parts yourself.As said above, if you want Apple, get the Mac Pro. If your time is valuable, get it pre-built with a support contract that probably costs an extra $5k+ (which is very worth it for commercial buyers).
I’d say only build this kind of system yourself if your time isn’t worth much - but then you wouldn’t be able to afford it - or if you have free support eg graduate students to farm it out to.
FunBunny2 - Saturday, January 25, 2020 - link
"I don’t have prices to hand but there has been discussion that the Mac Pro is competitively priced compared to buying the same parts yourself."That's always true; BigCorps buy in bulk and therefore at lower unit cost. There's a reason Amazon is killing local stores, and that's it. Trouble is, either consumers ignore the transport cost, or Amazon eats it. So far, it's mostly the latter. (e-tail will, in due time, devolve into supplying only low volume niche products that aren't profitable to stock locally.) Also, it turns out, in recent years most (i.e. more than 50%) of Amazon's turnover is from other vendors. Don't know how much Amazon's cut is, but the notion of 'central purchasing' beating on price might not be a given.
Death666Angel - Monday, January 27, 2020 - link
For some mid range configurations, the price is maybe okay. But you really should not upgrade the SSD or RAM at all via Apple, as far as I know, since the prices are steep. And the entry level is 5k for an 8 core, I believe?I stand by it, if you need MacOS, get Apple, otherwise why get a product that locks you into using Intel CPUs and AMD GPUs, both of which are not the be all end all these days in performance. Apple support also seems questionable with the Pro products, compared to other companies. Plus, if you don't need MacOS, chances are you need Windows or Linux and those don't run great (at all) on the Mac Pro.
And my "build it yourself" was not meant as a stict "get all the cheapest parts from 5 different vendors, then assemble it and test out all the edge cases". This isn't LTT. But not going with Apple allows you the freedom to check out all the classic workstation vendors and boutiques, look for the combination of CPU, GPU, RAM and storage that fits your needs with an OS and applications you actually use and then decide which brand you trust most and see who has competitive pricing.
peevee - Monday, January 27, 2020 - link
Is it the same company which has integrated Chinese spy chips on its boards?HoLiFuc - Wednesday, January 29, 2020 - link
That story was a whole lot of BS, is was already debunked already ages ago by Supermicro and other company's who where supposed to be affected.otherwise - Wednesday, February 26, 2020 - link
That was proven to be false. You might be thinking of Huawei which is still under sanctions for these claims.ender8282 - Monday, January 27, 2020 - link
Why no thread ripper comparisons?duploxxx - Thursday, January 30, 2020 - link
Because that would scratch half of the Intel benches from the graphHollyDOL - Tuesday, January 28, 2020 - link
Is it just me or is the board much more visually clean (layout wise, no rubbish etc.) than mainstream boards?Xajel - Tuesday, January 28, 2020 - link
I wish we see more mainstream workstation boards, things for Z390, X570 & TRX40 also...Hackerman12345fgn - Tuesday, January 28, 2020 - link
<i>XD</i>