Review: Aorus X399 Xtreme

by Tarinder Sandhu on 22 August 2018, 14:00

Tags: AORUS, Gigabyte (TPE:2376)

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Conclusion

Good points include baked-in 10Gbit/s Ethernet, great looks, integrated I/O shield, chunky M.2 cooling...

The AMD Threadripper CPU has been morphed into a workstation chip with the release of the WX line. As such, there is renewed focus on the supporting chipset, X399.

Aorus sees opportunity of pushing the features and performance up by a notch over the Gaming 7 from last year. The result of that thinking is a board aptly named the Xtreme.

Good points include baked-in 10Gbit/s Ethernet, great looks, integrated I/O shield, chunky M.2 cooling, restrained lighting, top-notch audio, and a really solid backplate. Each represent meaningful upgrades over the first-gen Gaming 7.

That said, the good is tempered by some potentially bad, notably the DIMM slots being close together, last-gen Wifi, and a perfunctory BIOS. Are those subjective negatives enough to take the shine off the package? The answer is probably not in our books, and the overall feeling is that the Xtreme is a solid base for the Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX in particular.

The Good
 
The Bad
Great cooling and power potential
Reasonable price
Integrated I/O
10Gbps Ethernet
Excellent M.2 cooling
 
Layout not perfect
Last-gen Wifi


Aorus X399 Xtreme

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The Aorus X399 Xtreme is available to purchase from Scan Computers.

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At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.



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HEXUS Forums :: 4 Comments

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Please activate Gaming mode when testing gaming. It switches it to 8 core mode and is equally as good as 7980XE. As it is now, you are misleading readers really.
yeeeeman
Please activate Gaming mode when testing gaming. It switches it to 8 core mode and is equally as good as 7980XE. As it is now, you are misleading readers really.

Thanks for your comment.

We, however, test out of the box and, as such, this is the performance we get. The reason to use the 2990WX was to see how well the motherboard performed with the premier, highest-wattage chip, especially when overclocked.

The next X399 motherboard review may well change the chip to the 2950X.
Ok, got it. Then I guess it would be very good from AMDs part to develop a way to make 2990WX to work in 8 core mode automatically when firing games. I think you can agree with the fact that this CPU is shown in a bad light because of this, when it is as good as 2700X for gaming.
The RAM issue - would that be negated by using the 4 outer slots, or are tall RAM sticks completely out the picture ? It seems a weird problem to introduce, considering this is a high end board most likely to be paired with high end RAM, but if it only affects the inner slots I can understand why. Using all 8 slots is definitely reserved for a much more niche crowd!