Motherboard Incoming AM4 Mini-ITX boards

[TheHig]

Back in the day the Biostar T series boards were great overclockers. I would guess that AsRock would be one of the other two. Heck they did put out the x99 itx board. It would be nice to see Gigabyte or Asus get into the mix.

 

[Sean Crees]

At CES we heard from several big manufacturers that they "are not" going to be making a Ryzen ITX board (When questioned, Gigabyte, ASRock, and ASUS reps told us that they weren't going to invest in ITX motherboards for AM4 unless sales are off the charts) but AMD specifically told me that 3 ITX boards are currently in development but they won't be available at Ryzen launch (AMD wouldn't discuss who was making them as the board partners asked not to be disclosed) so with Biostar announced, it makes me wonder who the other 2 players are.

Another thing worth mentioning is Biostar's use of the ATX-designed x370 chipset. I wonder if the other board partners will skip the "slightly gutted" ITX-designed x300 chipset altogether.

MSI and ASRock have a history of doing ITX related products before everyone else jumped on the bandwagon. I really hope MSI has an ITX x300 board, i really like their Intel ITX board layouts.

I'm hoping to see a full line of ITX boards from companies that are doing them. So like Biostar may have this x370, but maybe also have a B350 and x300 also at lower price points. Just because this is the only ITX Ryzen board from Biostar we know of, doesn't mean it'll be the only one they release.

 

[MarcParis]

This reminds me start of mini itx motherboards life when only zotac+silverstone (with sg07) were trying to develop mini itx gaming setup..
Clearly am4, and am4 mini itx have everything to prove

 

[Hawaii]

I'm hoping to see a full line of ITX boards from companies that are doing them. So like Biostar may have this x370, but maybe also have a B350 and x300 also at lower price points. Just because this is the only ITX Ryzen board from Biostar we know of, doesn't mean it'll be the only one they release.

Actually there are two mini-ITX MB from Biostar in that article, X370GTN and B350GTN.

 

[danger]

Summit Ridge has no graphics, so the video ports will not be usable unless you use Raven Ridge, right?

Disappointing that they are using HDMI 1.4 on ITX and mATX, but HDMI 2.0 on ATX... I hope that is not because of a limitation of Ryzen or Raven Ridge

 

[|||]

Summit Ridge has no graphics, so the video ports will not be usable unless you use Raven Ridge, right?

Disappointing that they are using HDMI 1.4 on ITX and mATX, but HDMI 2.0 on ATX... I hope that is not because of a limitation of Ryzen or Raven Ridge

Correct about the graphics ports. The AM4 socket supports all of AMD's upcoming chips, but all chips are not the same.

HDMI 2.0 requires an LSPcon, which adds costs and complexity. One of the things that motherboard manufacturers are concerned about is how much people are willing to pay for an AMD motherboard. With previous platforms, the expectation was that AMD was a good deal less expensive. However, from what has been heard, it is expected that the performance motherboards will be on par with the cost of the Intel boards. I'm guessing some of the motherboard manufacturers will be hedging their bets and also creating some bare bones cheap motherboards for those with low price expectations.

 

[cmyk78]

If the CPU's are cheaper I don't mind similarly priced motherboards.

 

[MarcParis]

http://www.tomshardware.fr/articles/cpu-ryzen-amd-prix,1-62745.html
In advance, sorry for the french..

To sum up :

• No 6 cores Ryzen, only 4 or 8 with SMT/HT
• Expected price : from 580$ to 720$ for SR7...to be confirmed of course...but if it's true, this could impact my choice on cpu platform for cerberus-x...but let's see...

 

[IntoxicatedPuma]

Ouch. That price is a bit high, but I guess it's still quite a bit lower than what Intel is charging. I hope the 8C/16T AMD is more competitive with the 8C/16T intel than the 6C/12T otherwise that's a hard sell. I think even bigger is how much AMD's SMT impact is - if SR3 and SR5 are about the same performance....

 

[ricochet]

Might be high but AMD desperately needs to make some money on this new CPU or they're dead... millions went into developing Ryzen so in as much as they need to sell as many of them as they can they also need to recup research/manufacturing/marketing costs as well and pricing too low would prove disastrous.

 

[Phuncz]

That price was already rumoured a while back, converted from the Yen currency I believe. In the end price/performance will matter to me and I'm willing to go with AMD even if the scale tips a little bit towards Intel.

 

[MarcParis]

Pricing is a sensitive balance..
My issue in pricing a 8C/16T @700$ is the platform...even X370 is clearly behind both X99..and even more Z270....it likes having a 500hp engine in a Dacia Logan.

 

[MarcParis]

Apparently am4 processors will be announced by 2nd of march...of course, it's to be confirmed

 

[MarcParis]

More news about Ryzen. http://www.tomshardware.fr/articles/processeur-ryzen-amd,1-62777.html

Well, finally it's confirmed that 6 cores ryzen will be released.

• 8C/16T : 3.6GHz
• 8C/16T : 3.4Ghz
• 6C/12T : 3.3GHz

Apparently no 8C/8T (maybe linked to the bug detected)

 

[Zerofool]

A total of 17 models, wow! I haven't been this excited about a CPU release in years. And the launch is less than a month away!

I really hope AMD delivers on the promised perf/watt. If they do, these CPUs would be perfect for SFF builds (when the proper mobos appear, hopefully sooner rather than later).

Sources of the leak: Coolaler (doesn't open for me for some reason), TPU, WCCFT, Guru3D, OC3D, TweakTown

 

[MarcParis]

Wowowow...no r7 1800x....no they can't call it like that....i have still my sweet ati x1800xt, that was introducing ring bus on a gpu...same generation xbox 360...nonono....i love it!!!!...

Now it's forbidden for amd to not deliver performance as they remind me such good memories!!!..

 

[Thehack]

Yeah. I loved my AMD builds. I am going to sell my Intel platform and go for the 6c/12t. Don't need the x series since we're talking SFF here and they already are unlocked.

Reminds me of my Barton 2500+ back when following CPU releases was fun. Now I wait to ditch my Nvidia card for proper Radeon SFF.

 

[MarcParis]

Another card to be played by AMD is IHS thermal paste.

When I see regress on intel skylake and even more on Kabylake, it's simply scandalous that Intel is using so cheap thermal compound. I'm not even speaking of thickness of pcb from Skylake...

For now, AM4 samples were using high end thermal compound
https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/overclocker_delids_amd_am4_cpu/1
Let's hope it will be also the case on release.

 

[EdZ]

When I see regress on intel skylake and even more on Kabylake, it's simply scandalous that Intel is using so cheap thermal compound. I'm not even speaking of thickness of pcb from Skylake...

If AMD have similarly small dies, they will have the same issues that result in TIM being mandatory rather than solder for Intel. And as known from testing of Ivy Bridge CPUs, the issue is not the TIM itself (which performs pretty much identically, like all TIMs) but with the adhesion of the IHS increasing the distance from the die top to the IHS base.
As to whether AMD can reduce IHS adhesion tolerances, they depends on what they consider an acceptable RMA rate. Low/no tolerance means an increased risk of cracking the die when installing the heatsink, and with the 2-axis clip-in retention bracket AM4 uses that means by design a high load will be applied to one edge of the package.

 

[MarcParis]

Well intel is to blame on lga 115x bad tim/heat transfert. Even on broadwell-e intel is doing far better.

Intel did clearly even worse than skylake on Kabylake...between the two i guess tolerance between ihs/die top didn't change that much.

Now let's see what will propose amd with summit ridge.