AMD has always had a better record than Intel at platform support. If you buy a team Blue board your upgrade path is limited: you’ll have to buy a new motherboard in two generations. Moreover, multi-core HEDT parts require even more expensive motherboards which also get outdated in a hurry.
With AMD’s Ryzen, things are almost always better than they seem. (Well, except for boost clocks. Bad AMD, Very bad.) Today, we’ve seen just how much better: An astute observer over at Computerbase noticed that an ASRock A320M motherboard (Yes, an entry-level micro-ATX mobo that doesn’t even allow overclocking) will support the beastly Ryzen 9 3950X when it arrives. Earlier, speculation indicated that the almost-Threadripper wouldn’t make it to entry AM4 boards simply because of its 105W TDP. But the Asrock A320 DVS R3.0 supports processors with TDPs up to 105W, seemingly to ensure compatibility with the 3950X.
Why you’d actually want to run a $750 dollar processor on a motherboard costing 15 times less is beyond me. But in the spirit of DIY, we’ve seen weirder things. And we salute AMD respecting customer choice.
Just how fast exactly is the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X?
It’s a third-gen Ryzen part with 16 cores and 32 threads, 64MB of cache, and a boost clock of 4.7 GHz. It’s essentially on par with the 2nd Gen Threadripper 2950X while offering higher IPC and support for standard AM4 boards. What’s not to like about it? The 3950X has yet to arrive, but we’ll be sure to fill you in on the details when we get our hands on it. The expected release date for the 3950X is November, along with the 3rd Gen Threadripper parts packing as many as 64 cores.
Further reading: