AMD Announces X300 and X370 AM4 Motherboards For Ryzen, All CPUs Unlocked (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: AMD has a lot riding on Ryzen, its new generation CPU architecture that is supposed to return the chip designer to a competitive position versus Intel in the high-end desktop X86 processor market. Late last week, at CES 2017, AMD has lined up over a dozen high-performance AM4 motherboards from five hardware partners, including ASRock, ASUS, Biostar, Gigabyte, and MSI. All AM4 motherboards are built around one of two desktop chipsets for Ryzen, the AMD X370 or X300. Motherboards based on the X370 chipset are intended for power users and gamers. These boards bring more robust overclocking controls and support for dual graphics cards, along with more I/O connectivity and dual-channel DDR4 memory support. The X300 is AMD's chipset for mini-ITX motherboards for small form factor (SFF) system platforms. The X300 also supports dual-channel DDR4 memory, PCIe 3.0, M.2 SATA devices, NVMe, and USB 3.1 Gen 1 and Gen 1. Finally, AMD representatives on hand at CES also reported that all Ryzen processors will be multiplier unlocked, hopefully for some rather flexible overclocking options. There will also be several processors in the family, with varying core counts depending on SKU, at launch.

Comments

No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing surprising here. Its not about the motherboard for ryzen, its all about the new CPU architecture and until we see benchmarks, there's Nothing To See Here.

Re:No surprise

[beelsebob]

That depends entirely on what benchmark you're looking at.

If you're goal is to play GooSplatter 2017 at 3840x2160@144Hz, then staring at a benchmark that reports the frame rate of GooSplatter 2017's rendering engine, with representative scenes from the game is an entirely reasonable thing to do.

Don't assume that all people staring at benchmarks don't understand what each test is actually measuring.

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? How do you decide which graphics card to buy? Let me guess, you just look at the tech specs and your massive brain can work out how well a particular game will run taking the bus size/frequency/no. of texture units etc. etc. into account?

Re:Just unlocked CPU multipliers...

[Kjella]

and believe we should all be able to either choose CPUs that lack them, or disable them entirely (motherboard jumper anyone?) as we wish.

If anyone can enable it via malware, they've already totally rooted your PC. If there is a secret NSA knock from the outside, it'll just ignore the jumper. Even if you buy one of the CPUs that lack this feature, you don't really know if Intel has fused it off. If they reuse design blocks it's quite possible entire product lines that don't offer that functionality have it anyway. If you're that paranoid maybe the easiest is a to use a third party NIC? Install a hardware firewall to monitor your connection? Personally I think a hack like that would be way too valuable a secret to risk exposing by going after consumers. There's probably a ton of military, big industry and infrastructure servers that run Intel and full, virtually undiscoverable backdoor access to that would be an espionage gold mine.