Threadripper 7000 Marches On! Checking Out The Asus SAGE TRX50

**The Asus Sage TX50: A Powerhouse of a Motherboard**

I ended up using the Be Quiet Dark Base 13 80+ Titanium for my power supply, built-in PCI5 connectors so I could use an Nvidia graphics card or whatever. The 850 watts is a little on the anemic side if I'm going to overclock, but if I add two of them that's 1,700 watts and you get around the North American lack of foresight problem because we have 15 or 20 amp Breakers here in North America which is known on the order of 1500 watts give or take. And actually with RMS and 80% load continuous whatever you don't want to have a circuit fully loaded but with two power supplies you plug into two different circuits in your house people with 220 volts don't have this problem well here we are just a couple of weeks after launch and I have been through everything with my Asus Sage TX50 motherboard since launch and it's holding up really well. The board features 32 cores, 64 cores, and even 96 cores, which is impressive for the price.

I'm also very impressed to learn that Falcon Northwest, that's their go-to board for their TRX 50 based systems, and if you didn't see my review of their rack system, you should check that out because it features the Asus TX50 motherboard. Now back here I'm running a 96 core Solution on console, I'm experimenting with processor groups which is not the same thing as Numa nodes under Windows and turns out the perfect split for the 96 core is this weird Numa setup where you have 64 threads per node and three nodes at that point everything pretty balanced but it's pretty tricky to get that configuration. Really the only thing I really have two complaints about the TX50, one there's no breakout headers or anything to give you external PCIe Gen 5 connections other than the PCI slots. I mean yeah it's great to have the M.2 we do have the M.2 cheat code option where we can throw something in an M.2 slot and pull those Gen five Lanes out of the M.2 but asus's competitors seem to have all embraced headers or connectors or other stuff that gives you features or access to the Gen 5 features on the board.

The other thing is memory so I've gone back and forth between the Enthusiast DDR5 6000 Registered Air Correcting Memory and server grade Server Spec Jedc DDR5 4800 Memory. This motherboard is really temperamental about moving back and forth between 512 GB of memory which is 128 GB per dim those are very expensive dims and gamer memory and right now I'm running a 256 GB configuration which is 6 x 4 GB per dim in all scenarios I pretty much have to clear the SEOS or take all the memory out and just put in one dim and the training still takes a very long time so if you go through that don't let that be unsettling. Part of it is just the DDR5 like initial training and subsequent trainings are actually really quick but when you change the memory configuration don't be surprised if your machine doesn't post for like 30 minutes you may actually have to use that clear SEOS button you may actually have to do other stuff in order to get it to go.

As far as I can tell, CXL devices are pretty well supported on the Intel workstation platform. I'm surprised there hasn't been a bios update or platform update or anything else for the TRX 50 given that it's been a couple of weeks now since launch from Asus. They have issued a firmware update for the USB 4x4 controller that's the 20 GB controller to improve USB connectivity with different uh 2x 10 GB connection USB devices which I sort of expected they might do that and it's nice to see Asus coming out the gate with that kind of support because people are using this board for lots of connectivity.

I'm still testing Thunderbolt, well okay PCIe tunneling, it's an addin Intel uh Thunderbolt chipset which enables a thunderbolt like but not quite Thunderbolt functionality on the platform to be able to connect PCIe tunneling USB devices to the platform yeah it's got the header for it and you can get it done but that's going to be a video for another day.

**Conclusion**

The Asus Sage TX50 is a powerhouse of a motherboard with great power delivery, making it perfect for users who want to overclock their CPU. While it has some minor drawbacks such as lacking breakout headers for PCIe Gen 5 connections and temperamental memory configuration, the board is still an excellent choice for anyone looking for a high-performance motherboard. With its impressive feature set, including support for CXL devices, Thunderbolt, and PCIe tunneling, the TX50 is sure to please even the most demanding users. Whether you're building a workstation or just want a reliable motherboard for your daily tasks, the Asus Sage TX50 is definitely worth considering.

**Rating:** 9/10

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enTRX 50 is the desktop class high-end desktop For Thread Ripper so thread Ripper and thread Ripper Pro are opening up simultaneously AMD is growing they're becoming stronger this video is focused on tx50 but be aware that there is the wx9 platform which is thread Ripper Pro and workstations are launching from companies like Falcon Northwest that are based around the thread rer Pro processor but this this is tx50 this is the tx50 sage Wi-Fi a little bit surprised that Asus didn't continue their Sapphire Rapids Ace versus Sage naming convention because with sapphire Rapids there's a four channnel memory version which is the Asus Ace and there's the Asus Sage which is the eight memory Channel version but this is the sage and it's four memory channels this motherboard is built for power delivery lots and lots and lots of power delivery so much power delivery it's crazy almost but not entirely PCI Express 5 most of the slots are PCI Express 5 except for the bottom two the bottom two slots here are Gen 4 so no hackery like buying an extra extra extra large case and hanging your GPU off the bottom so you get full use of all of the other PCI slots kind of makes sense TRX 50 you don't want the board to be absurdly expensive with redrive and everything else I get it but you are PCI Express 5 for your m.2 and your PCI slots this motherboard is unusual in that it supports dual power supply if you're going to go the dual power supply route make sure you got a case that supports dual power supply but also make sure that the power supplies are matched you should not use dual power supplies unless you're planning to overclock in which case dual power supplies is fine the gray slots are the primary ones there's little plastic tabs inserted in the ones that you're not supposed to use unless you do second power supply so just be aware of that there's also auxiliary power input puts for power hungry pcie devices this is Handy if you're running multiple gpus or something like that the board layout here is is pretty comprehensive there's USB type-c a multiplicity of four pin fan headers two USB 2.0 headers an rs232 serial header the normal front panel case connections TPM header you got four SATA at the front a 20 pin USB 5 GB header got a slim SAS connection which you can use for SATA or PCI Express for air rear IO it's pretty similar to what we've seen from higher end platforms this time around gone or the days of 7.1 analog audio we've got analog out microphone in but we do maintain that Optical spdif Connection we got three Banks of 10 gbit type A ports two 2.0 USB ports one of which is bios flashback which is important for future USB support and a 20 gig USB port no USB 4 here on this motherboard we've also got our bios flashback button and our clear Coss button there's also a Wi-Fi 6E Sol Solution that's built right in let's DeTour for a second to talk about memory these are R dims it's R dims up and down the stack some people might look at that and say I really would have liked to have had desktop class memory on the TRX 50 as an Enthusiast I'm going to say no but as someone trying to put myself in your position I'm also going to say no and the reasons kind of overlap but they're also kind of different you see ddr5 desktop memory and ddr5 server memory uh are products that have different design goals desktop ddr5 memory is all about cost minimization and bringing up ddr5 on a desk desktop platform it has been really difficult to achieve things like uh two dims per Channel and making sure the two dims per channel are going to be able to run at those upper echelons of what ddr5 is beginning to offer us two dims per Channel early in the ddr5 lifetime made sense when the fastest ddr5 memory you could get was 4,800 5200 5600 but now we're entering an era where ddr5 is 6, 7,000 8,000 and Beyond and while the latency is not really improving because the circuit is you know get some speed of light problems the speed of light is not getting any faster the transfer rate and the clock speed those are going up and that that really helps us when the companies that make the memory ic's are doing the bringup and they're doing the engineering they're doing it from a server perspective in terms of volume of memory chips most of those are going into the server platforms first and the server platforms have the margins the mass Market stuff doesn't have nearly the margin generally as server products and so the server products tend to be the most debugged the most quickly so in using ddr5 on you know team red or team blue bringing it up a little rough around the edges whereas ddr5 in server platform forms even on workstation platforms that support ddr5 overclocking I'm speaking specifically about Intel Sapphire Rapids platform it was a dream it was basically plug-and play and that's the same experience with TRX 50 for memory so if you don't want any memory headaches and you want your memory to run at some Ludicrous Speed you're probably better off with the TRX 50 platform that said ddr5 5200 is the officially supported speed from AMD do keep that in mind but AMD has got best-in-class memory l latencies with registered air correcting ddr5 in fact I don't know how they're doing this without vcash or some kind of other trickery anyway let's put together a system oh we're going to need a case to put all this in at least one power supply at least one for now we going to put it in a lean le1 Dynamic cuz it supports two power supplies Su B for the cooling we're going to use the NZXT Kraken 360 why because this is an acitech cooler enhanced and augmented by NZXT whatever that means and also this bracket which is bundled with the CPU this is basically the same for the last few generations of thread Ripper and so this bolts on that and then this cools the CPU we're going to try that and see how that goes and don't worry I'm going to have coverage of other CPU coolers as well your dead set against aios the Arctic freezer 4um this is a competent cooler that we'll get the job done not going to have a ton of overclocking Headroom but this is one of the best coolers for this socket that you can get right now period and it has the correct front to back orientation Amy has the absolute friendliest DIY installation mechanism there's a cover a latch thing there's a plastic sled and there's a protector for your socket so you can slide out the plastic thing slide in your CPU and then you can remove the protective cover from the socket there it is I ended up using the be quiet dark base 13 80 plus titanium for my power supply built-in pci5 connectors so I could use an Nvidia graphics card or whatever 850 watts is a little on the anemic side if I'm going to overclock but if I add two of them that's 1,700 watts and you get around the North American lack of foresight problem because we have 15 or 20 amp Breakers here in North America which is know on the order of 1500 watts give or take and actually with RMS and 80% load continuous whatever you don't want to have a circuit fully loaded but with two power supplies you plug into two different circuits in your house people with 220 volts don't have this problem well here we are just a couple of weeks after launch and I have been through everything with my Asus Sage tx50 motherboard since launch and it's holding up really well 32 cores 64 cores 96 cores I'm also very impressed to learn that falcon Northwest that's their go-to board for their TRX 50 based systems and if you didn't see my review of their rack system you should check that out because it features the Asus tx50 motherboard now back here I'm running a 96 core Solution on consol I'm experimenting with processor groups which is not the same thing as Numa nodes under windows and turns out the perfect split for the 96 core is this weird Numa setup where you have 64 threads per node and three nodes at that point everything pretty balanced but it's pretty tricky to get that configuration I really only have two complaints about the tx50 one there's no breakout headers or anything to give you external pcie Gen 5 connections other than the PCI slots I mean yeah it's get the m.2 we do have the m.2 cheat code option where we can throw something in an m.2 slot and pull those gen five Lanes out of the m.2 but asus's competitors seem to have all embraced headers or connectors or other stuff that gives you features or access to the Gen 5 features on the board the other thing is memory so I've gone back and forth between the Enthusiast ddr5 6000 registered air correcting memory and server grade server set spec jedc ddr5 4800 memory this motherboard is really temperamental about moving back and forth between 512 gbt of memory which is 128 GB per dim those are very expensive dims and gamer memory and right now I'm running a 256 GB configuration which is 6 4 GB per dim in all scenarios I pretty much have to clear the seos or take all the memory out and just put in one dim and the training still takes a very long time so if you go through that don't let that be unsettling part of that is just the ddr5 like initial training and subsequent trainings are actually really quick but when you change the memory configuration don't be surprised if your machine doesn't post for like 30 minutes you may actually have to use that clear seos button you may actually have to do other stuff in order to get it to go terms of of testing cxl devices well as far as I can tell cxl devices are pretty well supported on the Intel workstation platform I'm surprised there hasn't been a bios update or platform update or anything else for the TRX 50 given that it's been a couple of weeks now well almost a month now since launch from Asus they have issued a firmware update for the USB 4x4 controller that's the 20 GB controller to improve USB connectivity with different uh 2x 10 GB connection USB devices which I sort of expected they might do that and it's nice to see Asus coming out the gate with that kind of support because people are using this board for lots of connectivity I'm still testing Thunderbolt well okay pcie tunneling it's an addin Intel uh Thunderbolt chipset which enables a thunderbolt like but not quite Thunderbolt functionality on the platform to be able to connect pcie tunneling USB devices to the platform yeah it's got the header for it and you can you can get it done but that's going to be a video for another day and wonder this is level one be sure to check out my other tx50 videos bottom line the Asus Sage tx50 it's got the best power delivery of any tx50 motherboard if you're going to dump north of a kilowatt into your CPU but for everyday usage it's pretty good Overkill if anything uh wish they would uh add some more stuff to the BIOS and everything else but Asus so far so good I'm W level one I'm signing out you can find me in the level one forumsTRX 50 is the desktop class high-end desktop For Thread Ripper so thread Ripper and thread Ripper Pro are opening up simultaneously AMD is growing they're becoming stronger this video is focused on tx50 but be aware that there is the wx9 platform which is thread Ripper Pro and workstations are launching from companies like Falcon Northwest that are based around the thread rer Pro processor but this this is tx50 this is the tx50 sage Wi-Fi a little bit surprised that Asus didn't continue their Sapphire Rapids Ace versus Sage naming convention because with sapphire Rapids there's a four channnel memory version which is the Asus Ace and there's the Asus Sage which is the eight memory Channel version but this is the sage and it's four memory channels this motherboard is built for power delivery lots and lots and lots of power delivery so much power delivery it's crazy almost but not entirely PCI Express 5 most of the slots are PCI Express 5 except for the bottom two the bottom two slots here are Gen 4 so no hackery like buying an extra extra extra large case and hanging your GPU off the bottom so you get full use of all of the other PCI slots kind of makes sense TRX 50 you don't want the board to be absurdly expensive with redrive and everything else I get it but you are PCI Express 5 for your m.2 and your PCI slots this motherboard is unusual in that it supports dual power supply if you're going to go the dual power supply route make sure you got a case that supports dual power supply but also make sure that the power supplies are matched you should not use dual power supplies unless you're planning to overclock in which case dual power supplies is fine the gray slots are the primary ones there's little plastic tabs inserted in the ones that you're not supposed to use unless you do second power supply so just be aware of that there's also auxiliary power input puts for power hungry pcie devices this is Handy if you're running multiple gpus or something like that the board layout here is is pretty comprehensive there's USB type-c a multiplicity of four pin fan headers two USB 2.0 headers an rs232 serial header the normal front panel case connections TPM header you got four SATA at the front a 20 pin USB 5 GB header got a slim SAS connection which you can use for SATA or PCI Express for air rear IO it's pretty similar to what we've seen from higher end platforms this time around gone or the days of 7.1 analog audio we've got analog out microphone in but we do maintain that Optical spdif Connection we got three Banks of 10 gbit type A ports two 2.0 USB ports one of which is bios flashback which is important for future USB support and a 20 gig USB port no USB 4 here on this motherboard we've also got our bios flashback button and our clear Coss button there's also a Wi-Fi 6E Sol Solution that's built right in let's DeTour for a second to talk about memory these are R dims it's R dims up and down the stack some people might look at that and say I really would have liked to have had desktop class memory on the TRX 50 as an Enthusiast I'm going to say no but as someone trying to put myself in your position I'm also going to say no and the reasons kind of overlap but they're also kind of different you see ddr5 desktop memory and ddr5 server memory uh are products that have different design goals desktop ddr5 memory is all about cost minimization and bringing up ddr5 on a desk desktop platform it has been really difficult to achieve things like uh two dims per Channel and making sure the two dims per channel are going to be able to run at those upper echelons of what ddr5 is beginning to offer us two dims per Channel early in the ddr5 lifetime made sense when the fastest ddr5 memory you could get was 4,800 5200 5600 but now we're entering an era where ddr5 is 6, 7,000 8,000 and Beyond and while the latency is not really improving because the circuit is you know get some speed of light problems the speed of light is not getting any faster the transfer rate and the clock speed those are going up and that that really helps us when the companies that make the memory ic's are doing the bringup and they're doing the engineering they're doing it from a server perspective in terms of volume of memory chips most of those are going into the server platforms first and the server platforms have the margins the mass Market stuff doesn't have nearly the margin generally as server products and so the server products tend to be the most debugged the most quickly so in using ddr5 on you know team red or team blue bringing it up a little rough around the edges whereas ddr5 in server platform forms even on workstation platforms that support ddr5 overclocking I'm speaking specifically about Intel Sapphire Rapids platform it was a dream it was basically plug-and play and that's the same experience with TRX 50 for memory so if you don't want any memory headaches and you want your memory to run at some Ludicrous Speed you're probably better off with the TRX 50 platform that said ddr5 5200 is the officially supported speed from AMD do keep that in mind but AMD has got best-in-class memory l latencies with registered air correcting ddr5 in fact I don't know how they're doing this without vcash or some kind of other trickery anyway let's put together a system oh we're going to need a case to put all this in at least one power supply at least one for now we going to put it in a lean le1 Dynamic cuz it supports two power supplies Su B for the cooling we're going to use the NZXT Kraken 360 why because this is an acitech cooler enhanced and augmented by NZXT whatever that means and also this bracket which is bundled with the CPU this is basically the same for the last few generations of thread Ripper and so this bolts on that and then this cools the CPU we're going to try that and see how that goes and don't worry I'm going to have coverage of other CPU coolers as well your dead set against aios the Arctic freezer 4um this is a competent cooler that we'll get the job done not going to have a ton of overclocking Headroom but this is one of the best coolers for this socket that you can get right now period and it has the correct front to back orientation Amy has the absolute friendliest DIY installation mechanism there's a cover a latch thing there's a plastic sled and there's a protector for your socket so you can slide out the plastic thing slide in your CPU and then you can remove the protective cover from the socket there it is I ended up using the be quiet dark base 13 80 plus titanium for my power supply built-in pci5 connectors so I could use an Nvidia graphics card or whatever 850 watts is a little on the anemic side if I'm going to overclock but if I add two of them that's 1,700 watts and you get around the North American lack of foresight problem because we have 15 or 20 amp Breakers here in North America which is know on the order of 1500 watts give or take and actually with RMS and 80% load continuous whatever you don't want to have a circuit fully loaded but with two power supplies you plug into two different circuits in your house people with 220 volts don't have this problem well here we are just a couple of weeks after launch and I have been through everything with my Asus Sage tx50 motherboard since launch and it's holding up really well 32 cores 64 cores 96 cores I'm also very impressed to learn that falcon Northwest that's their go-to board for their TRX 50 based systems and if you didn't see my review of their rack system you should check that out because it features the Asus tx50 motherboard now back here I'm running a 96 core Solution on consol I'm experimenting with processor groups which is not the same thing as Numa nodes under windows and turns out the perfect split for the 96 core is this weird Numa setup where you have 64 threads per node and three nodes at that point everything pretty balanced but it's pretty tricky to get that configuration I really only have two complaints about the tx50 one there's no breakout headers or anything to give you external pcie Gen 5 connections other than the PCI slots I mean yeah it's get the m.2 we do have the m.2 cheat code option where we can throw something in an m.2 slot and pull those gen five Lanes out of the m.2 but asus's competitors seem to have all embraced headers or connectors or other stuff that gives you features or access to the Gen 5 features on the board the other thing is memory so I've gone back and forth between the Enthusiast ddr5 6000 registered air correcting memory and server grade server set spec jedc ddr5 4800 memory this motherboard is really temperamental about moving back and forth between 512 gbt of memory which is 128 GB per dim those are very expensive dims and gamer memory and right now I'm running a 256 GB configuration which is 6 4 GB per dim in all scenarios I pretty much have to clear the seos or take all the memory out and just put in one dim and the training still takes a very long time so if you go through that don't let that be unsettling part of that is just the ddr5 like initial training and subsequent trainings are actually really quick but when you change the memory configuration don't be surprised if your machine doesn't post for like 30 minutes you may actually have to use that clear seos button you may actually have to do other stuff in order to get it to go terms of of testing cxl devices well as far as I can tell cxl devices are pretty well supported on the Intel workstation platform I'm surprised there hasn't been a bios update or platform update or anything else for the TRX 50 given that it's been a couple of weeks now well almost a month now since launch from Asus they have issued a firmware update for the USB 4x4 controller that's the 20 GB controller to improve USB connectivity with different uh 2x 10 GB connection USB devices which I sort of expected they might do that and it's nice to see Asus coming out the gate with that kind of support because people are using this board for lots of connectivity I'm still testing Thunderbolt well okay pcie tunneling it's an addin Intel uh Thunderbolt chipset which enables a thunderbolt like but not quite Thunderbolt functionality on the platform to be able to connect pcie tunneling USB devices to the platform yeah it's got the header for it and you can you can get it done but that's going to be a video for another day and wonder this is level one be sure to check out my other tx50 videos bottom line the Asus Sage tx50 it's got the best power delivery of any tx50 motherboard if you're going to dump north of a kilowatt into your CPU but for everyday usage it's pretty good Overkill if anything uh wish they would uh add some more stuff to the BIOS and everything else but Asus so far so good I'm W level one I'm signing out you can find me in the level one forums\n"