ASUS ROG Zenith Extreme X399 Motherboard Review
ASUS ROG Zenith Extreme X399 Motherboard - Hey guys, today we're going to check out the a sous rog zennith Xtreme x3 99 motherboard. This is a thread ripper board which I'm using in my new PC I'll cover. What'S on offer, as well as the problems I've had with it so far that you should be aware of before buying inside the box, there's quite a lot of components, starting with the motherboard itself.
Under that there's a box full of extra items, including a brace for the graphics card, a 10 gigabit network card, the dim expansion card, SLI, bridges, 4 to 3 and four-way SLI configurations, a faired hub to antennas for the Wi-Fi and a USB stick containing the drivers. As well as heaps of additional cables for just about everything, this is an e ATX board.
It'S thirty point: five centimeters by twenty seven point: seven centimeters and I've installed it into my Thermaltake, for you 71 case. Let'S start by taking a closer look at the rear. I/O, the i/o shield is attached to the board, so no need to install that first from left to right, we've got the BIOS flashback in clear CMOS buttons.
Next, there are three connectors for the included Wi-Fi antenna. After that there are eight USB 3.1 gen2 on type. A ports which are colored blue and a built-in Gigabit Ethernet port, there's two USB 3.1 gen2 ports. One is type-a and colored red, while the other is a type C port, as well as an optical s/pdif out and your usual audio outputs, which light up with LEDs.
Now, let's check out the rest of the board along the top from the left to right, there's a waterblock connector, RGB header and in the top right corner, there's a CPU fan and CPU octet, ah working down from here along the right-hand side of the board. There'S two eight pin power connectors physical power on and reset buttons, which were nice to have, while troubleshooting a 24 pin power connector and a USB 3.1 gen2 header with another fan header.
Behind that the rest of the IR on the right faces out to the side. We'Ve got a USB 3.1 gen2, I'm had on 6 SATA 3 connectors and one: u dot: 2 output along the bottom from right to left. There'S the usual front panel connectors various pump connectors for water cooling, Ellen 2 jumpers for liquid nitrogen support buttons for safe boot. More fan headers another USB 3
1 gen2 on connector, USB 2.0 connector, addressable, RGB and or RGB headers, TPM connector, easy power plug if you're running heaps of GPUs front-panel audio connectors. So there's quite a lot going on. Of course, in the center of the board, we've got the tr4 socket, which I'm using for my 16 core AMD 1950 X CPU. I had a lot of trouble getting the CPU installed, as you may have heard, the Foxconn sockets don't seem to be as good as the loads ones.
You'Re meant to tighten the screws in a specified order. However, I had to half-turn screws two and three first then put my full body weight behind number one to get it to thread and I'm not alone with this issue. I eventually got it in, but I was pretty worried. I was going to damage the board just installing it. Hopefully this will be fixed in future revisions.
The socket is surrounded by the eight memory slots which run in quad channel that support up to 128 gigabytes of ddr4 memory at two thousand six hundred and sixty-six megahertz, with the possibility of overclocking to three thousand six hundred megahertz. I had difficulty getting above 3000 megahertz using my g.skill tradency kit, but that wasn't on the supported parts list.
So if you plan on overclocking make sure you pick supported, memory from the qvl as AMD's platforms seem to be fairly picky with memory. You also have the option of using ECC memory here, a nice touch if you're running a thread, Ripper workstation or server. So what's the right of the memory slots? Is the expansion dim to slow? This is an interesting feature.
Basically, you connect the included, add in pod into what is essentially another ddr4 interface slot in order to run up to two m dot two drives. These can be 30 40 to 60, 80 or 110 millimeters in length. I haven't been using this yet as there's also a single end: dot two PCIe slot onto the metal plate with our G logo.
This panel also acts as a heat sink for the X 399 chipset, and it's got a thermal pad underneath which comes into contact with the m dot to drive this support here for m dot. Two drives 40 to 60 and 80 millimeters in length. The RGB lighting also shines through the ROG logo cut out as for available PCIe slots from the top down there's PCI 3. 16. 8. 4. 16, 1 & 8 slots.
This supports up to either four-way SLI or crossfire. The top 16x slot is closer to the CPU. Socket than other X, 399 motherboards so check your CPU cooler won't overhang. The slot like mine does I've got the naktu au 14s cooler and it blocks out the first slot preventing me from using it. That'S not an issue for me, as I'm only running one graphics card in the second 16x slot, but if I want to use both in the future, I'll need to look at changing the CPU call.
That is something more speaking of PCIe slots. The included 10 gigabit network card will let you boost your network speed. As long as your network supports such speeds, it connects using a pcie, 3.0 4x interface and I ended up putting mine into the otherwise unusable top 16x slot. It'S covered in a heatsink to help call it and has some LEDs on top, which advise the speed of the network connection.
If you have no use for this card, I'd probably recommend looking at a different X, 399 motherboard, as this card itself costs around 140 US dollars. So it would be adding significant cost to the overall price of the board I'll be upgrading my network to 10 gigabit in the near future, so I'll definitely be making use of this. While we're talking about network connectivity, let's dive into the Wi-Fi, there are two antennas included with the board. The first is jewel band and connects to two of the connectors on the back of the motherboard. This one handles 802 11 a/b/g/n and ac standards over 2.4 gigahertz or 5 gigahertz frequencies. The second antenna plugs into the third connector and is fado 2
11 ad, also known as hwagok, which operates on the 60 gigahertz frequency with speeds up to 4.6 gigabytes per second. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to test this for myself, as I don't have any devices to take advantage of the ad standard. Yet both antennas have stands to hold themselves up and there's also support for Bluetooth 4.1. As you may have noticed, the board has RGB lighting, but I think it looks nice and isn't overdone.
It features a Seuss's or a sync, so you can use their software to customize the lighting effects and also synchronize other components, which is what I'm doing here. With my g.skill memory, the lighting is present around the bright edge of the board on the middle plate, with the ROG Lugar and on the shroud covering the i/o. The Irish route also covers a tiny fan which you'll hear spinning up on system boot. Just under that there's a small OLED panel, which gives useful system information.
I found this really helpful during Burtt when I had problems as I would print out the error code while running it will show the current CPU temperature by default, but you can change it to show CPU frequency fan, speed, water, cooling, information or even a custom gif On the back of the board, there's a nice backplate, not that you'll see it once installed. I had difficulty installing this into my thermal. Take the U 71 case, although the case does support the e ATX form factor.
The motherboard covers the cable routing grommets and the backplate comes into contact with the rubber grommets. So I had to remove the rubber from the case so that the board sit flush against the case once getting up and running the board has worked great. I did have some issues when building the system, as already mentioned, including the CPU cooler overhanging of the first PCIe slot difficulty, installing the CPU in the Foxconn socket and backplate coming into direct contact with some of the case.
These type of issues are only minor and once you work around them, you'll probably be fine for as long as you continue using the system, I haven't had any further issues since building the system a few months ago, while building.
I also had a few different issues with the memory being recognized, initially long story short, I updated to the latest bios by simply copying the files to a USB stick, inserting it into the BIOS USB port and pressing the BIOS button, and that fixed everything for me. So make sure you're running the most up-to-date version of the BIOS. The BIOS update process was extremely simple.
To do this way, I was quite impressed. So what did you guys think of the asou sinneth extreme motherboard, it's the most expensive x 399 board at the time of recording and there are definitely cheap options out there. However, in my personal opinion, this one looks the nicest and has really useful features and add-ons, such as the inclusion of the ten gigabit network card, which I'll be using be sure to.