ASUS X399 ROG Zenith Extreme AMD Ryzen Motherboard Gets Unboxed Ahead Of Launch
ASUS has already announced its X399 Republic of Gamers (ROG) Zenith Extreme — say that three times fast — but the motherboard has made its way into the wild ahead of the official launch of Ryzen Threadripper. As its name suggests, the HEDT board is based on AMD’s X399 chipset and features the new TR4 processor socket.
Given that this is a motherboard aimed at the ultimate gaming enthusiast, the retail box pictured below comes loaded to the gills with accessories. You’ll find a PCIe 10G NIC, antennas for the onboard 802.11ad Wi-Fi, ROG DIMM.2 extension card, 2-way SLI Bridge, 3-way SLI Bridge, and a gaggle of cables (among other things).
As you might expect from such a premium motherboard, you’ll find AURA Sync lighting synchronization, dual headers for LED light strips, and an integrated OLED display for showing off custom text, graphics, system status or even animated GIFs. Other features include integrated SupremeFX audio with an S1220 codec.
Keeping power-hungry and toasty Ryzen Threadripper processors at bay (especially when overclocked) is no easy task, so ASUS is ensuring that keeping all of your components cool is a high priority:
The proverbial “Cool and Quiet” mantra got its start with the old Athlon 64, and we’ve really taken the theme to heart. Our motherboard fan controls constantly evolve to give you smarter cooling with quieter acoustics. Recent additions include adjustable hysteresis, which controls how quickly or slowly fans react to brief bursts in activity; and grouping, which lets you bind multiple temperature sensors to a single fan so it can react intelligently to a wide range of workloads. The addition of GPU temperature sensing for compatible graphics cards lets you tailor your cooling specifically for gaming loads that heat up the GPU more than any other component.
We expect to hear a lot more about the ASUS X399 ROG Zenith Extreme motherboard during AMD’s “Meet the Experts” webinar, which will take place on July 25th.
As for Ryzen Threadripper, these are the two SKUs that AMD will release to enthusiasts next month:
- Ryzen Threadripper 1920X: 12 Cores, 24 Threads, 3.5/4.0 GHz (Base Clock/Precision Boost)
- Ryzen Threadripper 1950X: 16 Cores, 32 Threads, 3.4/4.0 GHz (Base Clock/Precision Boost)
Both processors will be going head-to-head with Intel’s Core X-Series family, and will come fresh out of the starting gate with a huge pricing advantage. Whereas Intel’s 12-core/24-thread Core i9-7920X will be priced at $1,199, the Ryzen Threadripper 1920X easily undercuts that price at $799. Likewise, the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X has a $700 pricing advantage over the 16-core/32-thread Core i9-7960X, which is priced at $1,699.
