I... don't understand how AMD does not seem to exist in the universe where you are testing this board? Hasn't AMD pretty much made any Intel-based workstation/HEDT build pointless at this point? or what am I missing here that you would want to consider building a Xeon workstation for in 2021? I can't tell because the word 'AMD' is not even mentioned in the entire review.
Classic behaviour from www.IntelTech.com. No review of the new AMD GPU's to be seen. And no mention of AMD in this review. (i.e how this board is effectively a waste of money, as who would want to by Intel at the moment)
Point being why even review this in the context of a world where the platform AMD exists? From a feature and performance stance AMD is better on both. Unless there is something Supermicro has that other board vendors don't as I don't think Supermicro has a "workstation" AM4 board but still, so what...
I get paid more than 120 to 130 per hour for working online. I heard about this job 3 months ago and after joining this i have earned easily 15k from this without having online working skills. This is what I do.....___
I get paid more than 120 to 130 per hour for working online. I heard about this job 3 months ago and after joining this i have earned easily 15k from this without having online working skills. This is what I do.....___
I get paid more than 120 to 130 per hour for working online. I heard about this job 3 months ago and after joining this i have earned easily 15k from this without having online working skills. This is what I do.....___bit.ly/googlework75
So ummn first of all the didn't review nvidia's 3000 series GPUs so what makes you think that they would review AMD's offering? Also as far as I can tell, this is a chipset review not a CPU review. So I don't think that you have brought any valid claims as to their being a fanboys. Also if they were Intel fanboys as you claim, I don't thing they would have given the favourable review that they gave Apple's M1 silicon or Ryzen 5000 series either.
These are 2 pay checks $78367 and $87367. that i received in last 2 months. I am very happy that i can make thousands in my part time and now i am enjoying my life. Everybody can do this and earn lots of dollars from home in very short time period. Just visit this website now. Your Success is one step away Copy and Paste___bit.ly/googlework43
Jorgp2, they dont care. seems the wild fires in california are not reason for AT to NOT post their reviews of video cards. people have been crying about this since the RTX 30 series were released.
Good to know that a professional website, with the backing of future PLC, is dependent on one guy in his house to do reviews. What was the point of selling out again?
This is not a "Which computer should I buy?" article. It's a review of an Intel-compatible motherboard, so comparing it to other Intel-compatible motherboards makes sense. I don't really see the need to mention AMD.
If you want to know why people would buy an Intel-based computer, you can ask in the forum and maybe some users will give you an answer.
Point being why even review this in the context of a world where the platform AMD exists? From a feature and performance stance AMD is better on both. Unless there is something Supermicro has that other board vendors don't as I don't think Supermicro has a "workstation" AM4 board but still, so what...
Products deserve reviews even if the reviews show them to be less compelling versus the competition. For a general audience, the competitiveness factor should be mentioned. For more niche audiences it's not necessarily necessary.
"Last time i checked there were only two AM4 workstation boards, and they're both made by supermicro."
How many does a person need to pick from? Just one means the company is present in the niche. And, when a company isn't present but could be that is also noteworthy context.
AMD doesn't officially validate ECC on Ryzen processors. Most motherboards don't support it at all, and the ones that do are on a "this seems to work" basis, which isn't how corporate IT does things. There've been many reports of Ryzen setups where ECC appears to be fully enabled in the BIOS and hardware but doesn't actually report memory errors.
Threadripper has proper support for ECC, but is far above the price range of CPUs mentioned in this article.
There are also a handful of workloads where Intel processors do outperform the AMD price-equivalent, most obviously things using AVX512.
Amazon is currently selling TR 2950X at $590, although that is a clear-out price.
So, that takes the 2950X near to the W-1290P in terms of price while being a 16/32 chip rather than 6/12. The TR is probably not as good for things like high-frequency trading but should kill the Intel in the heavily threaded stuff.
Not so relevant for big business since those parts are probably rather limited in terms of stock but relevant to individual shoppers.
Concerning the "many reports", where do I find them? And if there are no failures, I would not expect any error reports. And while reports are useful to find broken DIMMs, the most important feature of ECC memory is that errors are corrected. In any case, in my testing I did see errors reported to the OS.
While you are mostly right, nonetheless there are a few Ryzen motherboards that are sold as server motherboards or as workstation motherboards, so at least for the motherboards, full ECC support is claimed.
For example, I am using since last year a workstation motherboard that directly competes with the one reviewed: ASUS Pro WS X570-ACE.
I am using it with ECC memory, and I have verified that it works OK.
And have I forgotten to add that with this Ryzen workstation MB I have replaced precisely a Supermicro workstation MB, the predecessor from the X11 series of the one reviewed. Obviously with excellent results.
Unfortunately, AMD does not serve the market that this kind of board is for: AMD does not sell Ryzens (except the embedded Ryzen V2000) or Athlons where it officially supports ECC. Yes, you can build a Ryzen system with ECC (and we have such systems), but if you need official support (for CYA reasons), AMD does not compete.
We have mixed experiences with Supermicro, although they are from over a decade ago. One machine with a Supermicro board works to this day, 14 years later. 4 other Supermicro machines had problems from the start and died after a few years, and because major components were non-standard, they were a complete writeoff. We have good experiences with Tyan (these machines still work after 15+ years), but no recent experiences (somehow they no longer show up in our product searches); anyway, they don't have AM4 boards according to their website, only SP3 and TR4.
I snagged a 65W Ryzen 3700X last week for $280 __ equivalent to the W-1270 80w
"For every current W480 model on the market, there are at least 4-5 Z490 variants" ___________________________________________________
And that's the rub on the workstation front. The woods are full of AMD chipsets and CPUs that "support ECC modules yet operate in non-ECC mode" __ some functionally supporting ECC modules. For the most part AMD held up their end of **chipset bargain** even as motherboards have grown more complex.
The chipset fans ain't so bad, after all __ though I'm still a bit torqued that TR was orphaned ...
Let's hear about your application which requires more bandwidth than PCIe3 can provide.
I never understood all those people who complained about "two thunderbolt lanes" and "only pcie 3" but when asked to provide concrete examples where this would not be enough did not have any.
RoCE/iWARP link is a good example. Even a small software-defined storage setup will easily saturate a pair of 50GbE links. 100/200/400 GbE needs PCIe 4 as a practical requirement.
That's a common use case for this stuff. RDMA cards are $300-400. I'm not sure why you think RDMA is so fancy to need dual or quad socket. Run it on an i5 for all it cares.
The networking issue may be a result of a faulty 1V/V2 revision i225-V LAN controller chip. When plugged into a switch or router at 2.5Gbit, they have a malformed Inter-Packet Gap that can cause dropout, heavily reduced bandwidth or atrocious latency. It was covered briefly at the time and has since fallen a bit by the wayside, but wouldn't surprise me if it was the root cause.
agreed. the one time I needed support from supermicro, un-f88king-believable - worst I've seen from a tech company. I do have a lot of SM mobos (workstation and server), the products are decent for the most part, but you're f88ked if you need support. I try to buy intel and tyan now-a-days.
With regard to ECC memory...if I have this X12SAE motherboard with a Xeon W-1290E CPU, do I HAVE to use ECC UDIMMS? or will the system operate with more common non-ECC UDIMMS?
this would ignore the "Why don't you just use a core i9 instead of W-1290E" question
Those core counts in the table on page 1 are way off for the most part some copy and paste errors e.g. 1290p is 10 cores, 20 threads. Regarding Intel vs AMD Right now it's tricky in the Workststion space companies want the backup of OEM support only lenovo has broken and started offering threadripper Pro which to be honest isn't that compelling. At the low end most are OK without ECC ram so rysen 5000 would do well against i7/i9 workstations from dell/hp lenovo but as soon as you get to things like FEA, CFD other scientific type workloads then ECC is what users are looking for and not all of them need masses of cores it depends on the solver, problem type etc how well it scales But A small change from AMD in properly supporting ECC would make a big difference to making inroads Maybe they are just less focused on this market as their Radeon pro cards fall ever behind NVIDIA Quadro (I refuse to stop using that name as its just crasy to drop such a string brand!)
Wait... a *PCI* slot?! Like from 1992??? Where did they even find the old-new stock of PCI connectors? Crazy to think that a board that worked in a 486 (albeit a limited subset of 486 systems) can work in this board!
Old slot types are not for sound or video cards, but for specialized boards for interfacing to expensive machinery where the manufacturer charges and arm and a leg for a modern replacement board (if there is one at all), went out of business, was bought up, etc.
Great article if one were looking for a low power consumption mobo for W-1270. But that audience must be rather small as there are much better options price/performance wise. Strange.
Sensors reading out of range and super doctor beeping is typical with supermicro WS boards. It's pretty annoying, I've had several that showen behaviour like this.
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55 Comments
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MFC - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Check the 2nd line in the Monolithic Power Systems Mosfet. The top line is the date code, the 2nd line is the part number. 3rd line is the lot number.tpurves - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
I... don't understand how AMD does not seem to exist in the universe where you are testing this board? Hasn't AMD pretty much made any Intel-based workstation/HEDT build pointless at this point? or what am I missing here that you would want to consider building a Xeon workstation for in 2021? I can't tell because the word 'AMD' is not even mentioned in the entire review.DannyH246 - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Classic behaviour from www.IntelTech.com.No review of the new AMD GPU's to be seen. And no mention of AMD in this review. (i.e how this board is effectively a waste of money, as who would want to by Intel at the moment)
Operandi - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Point being why even review this in the context of a world where the platform AMD exists? From a feature and performance stance AMD is better on both. Unless there is something Supermicro has that other board vendors don't as I don't think Supermicro has a "workstation" AM4 board but still, so what...christinescoms - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
hellochristinescoms - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
I get paid more than 120 to 130 per hour for working online. I heard about this job 3 months ago and after joining this i have earned easily 15k from this without having online working skills. This is what I do.....___christinescoms - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
I get paid more than 120 to 130 per hour for working online. I heard about this job 3 months ago and after joining this i have earned easily 15k from this without having online working skills. This is what I do.....___christinescoms - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
I get paid more than 120 to 130 per hour for working online. I heard about this job 3 months ago and after joining this i have earned easily 15k from this without having online working skills. This is what I do.....___bit.ly/googlework75Deicidium369 - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Yeah how shortsighted to not include AMD in a review of an Intel motherboard - this is pure fanboyism on Anandtech's part.../s
Oxford Guy - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
People are quick to claim maliciousness but sometimes oversights and oversights.It is an oversight to not present a product in its context. The context does include the competition.
Deicidium369 - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
did you notice the /s sarcasm tag?and no, it's not an oversight to present the product in its context - goes the same when there is a review of an AMD board.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - link
"and no, it's not an oversight to present the product in its context"lol
JfromImaginstuff - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
So ummn first of all the didn't review nvidia's 3000 series GPUs so what makes you think that they would review AMD's offering? Also as far as I can tell, this is a chipset review not a CPU review. So I don't think that you have brought any valid claims as to their being a fanboys. Also if they were Intel fanboys as you claim, I don't thing they would have given the favourable review that they gave Apple's M1 silicon or Ryzen 5000 series either.JKJK - Sunday, December 13, 2020 - link
Supermicro doesn' have AMD Threadripper boards, so you'll have to blame them. Not anandtech. It's abad choice for supermicro though.OliveGray - Sunday, December 13, 2020 - link
These are 2 pay checks $78367 and $87367. that i received in last 2 months. I am very happy that i can make thousands in my part time and now i am enjoying my life. Everybody can do this and earn lots of dollars from home in very short time period. Just visit this website now. Your Success is one step away Copy and Paste___bit.ly/googlework43Jorgp2 - Sunday, December 13, 2020 - link
Hey asshole, want to know why there isnt a review for the AMD GPUs?The guys house burned down, he has more important shit to do.
Qasar - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
Jorgp2, they dont care. seems the wild fires in california are not reason for AT to NOT post their reviews of video cards. people have been crying about this since the RTX 30 series were released.TheinsanegamerN - Monday, December 14, 2020 - link
Good to know that a professional website, with the backing of future PLC, is dependent on one guy in his house to do reviews. What was the point of selling out again?vFunct - Friday, December 25, 2020 - link
Glad you think professionals are robots that should ignore personal issues.desii - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
This is not a "Which computer should I buy?" article. It's a review of an Intel-compatible motherboard, so comparing it to other Intel-compatible motherboards makes sense. I don't really see the need to mention AMD.If you want to know why people would buy an Intel-based computer, you can ask in the forum and maybe some users will give you an answer.
Operandi - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
**meant to reply here**Point being why even review this in the context of a world where the platform AMD exists? From a feature and performance stance AMD is better on both. Unless there is something Supermicro has that other board vendors don't as I don't think Supermicro has a "workstation" AM4 board but still, so what...
Oxford Guy - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Products deserve reviews even if the reviews show them to be less compelling versus the competition. For a general audience, the competitiveness factor should be mentioned. For more niche audiences it's not necessarily necessary.Jorgp2 - Sunday, December 13, 2020 - link
>Point being why even review this in the context of a world where the platform AMD exists?AMD exists?
Last time i checked there were only two AM4 workstation boards, and they're both made by supermicro.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - link
"Last time i checked there were only two AM4 workstation boards, and they're both made by supermicro."How many does a person need to pick from? Just one means the company is present in the niche. And, when a company isn't present but could be that is also noteworthy context.
FLHerne - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
AMD doesn't officially validate ECC on Ryzen processors. Most motherboards don't support it at all, and the ones that do are on a "this seems to work" basis, which isn't how corporate IT does things. There've been many reports of Ryzen setups where ECC appears to be fully enabled in the BIOS and hardware but doesn't actually report memory errors.Threadripper has proper support for ECC, but is far above the price range of CPUs mentioned in this article.
There are also a handful of workloads where Intel processors do outperform the AMD price-equivalent, most obviously things using AVX512.
Oxford Guy - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Amazon is currently selling TR 2950X at $590, although that is a clear-out price.So, that takes the 2950X near to the W-1290P in terms of price while being a 16/32 chip rather than 6/12. The TR is probably not as good for things like high-frequency trading but should kill the Intel in the heavily threaded stuff.
Not so relevant for big business since those parts are probably rather limited in terms of stock but relevant to individual shoppers.
Oxford Guy - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
"e.g. 1290p is 10 cores, 20 threads."Okay... so a bit less drastic of a difference.
AntonErtl - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
Concerning the "many reports", where do I find them? And if there are no failures, I would not expect any error reports. And while reports are useful to find broken DIMMs, the most important feature of ECC memory is that errors are corrected. In any case, in my testing I did see errors reported to the OS.AdrianBc - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
While you are mostly right, nonetheless there are a few Ryzen motherboards that are sold as server motherboards or as workstation motherboards, so at least for the motherboards, full ECC support is claimed.For example, I am using since last year a workstation motherboard that directly competes with the one reviewed: ASUS Pro WS X570-ACE.
I am using it with ECC memory, and I have verified that it works OK.
AdrianBc - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
And have I forgotten to add that with this Ryzen workstation MB I have replaced precisely a Supermicro workstation MB, the predecessor from the X11 series of the one reviewed. Obviously with excellent results.timecop1818 - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
> Hasn't AMD pretty much made any Intel-based workstation/HEDT build pointlessNot at all, those who want an actual working and stable platform continue to build with Intel.
The reason why an Intel motherboard review didn't mention AMD should be fucking obvious, it's completely irrelevant here.
ae00711 - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
troll much?Qasar - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
thats what timecop1818 does best 😂😂😂😂😂AntonErtl - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
Unfortunately, AMD does not serve the market that this kind of board is for: AMD does not sell Ryzens (except the embedded Ryzen V2000) or Athlons where it officially supports ECC. Yes, you can build a Ryzen system with ECC (and we have such systems), but if you need official support (for CYA reasons), AMD does not compete.Foeketijn - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
Well, AMD misses one important thing, and that is an AM4 supermicroboard. That's why I switched to asrockrack.AntonErtl - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
We have mixed experiences with Supermicro, although they are from over a decade ago. One machine with a Supermicro board works to this day, 14 years later. 4 other Supermicro machines had problems from the start and died after a few years, and because major components were non-standard, they were a complete writeoff. We have good experiences with Tyan (these machines still work after 15+ years), but no recent experiences (somehow they no longer show up in our product searches); anyway, they don't have AM4 boards according to their website, only SP3 and TR4.OliveGray - Sunday, December 13, 2020 - link
hySmell This - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
I snagged a 65W Ryzen 3700X last week for $280 __ equivalent to the W-1270 80w"For every current W480 model on the market, there are at least 4-5 Z490 variants"
___________________________________________________
And that's the rub on the workstation front. The woods are full of AMD chipsets and CPUs that "support ECC modules yet operate in non-ECC mode" __ some functionally supporting ECC modules. For the most part AMD held up their end of **chipset bargain** even as motherboards have grown more complex.
The chipset fans ain't so bad, after all __ though I'm still a bit torqued that TR was orphaned ...
shabby - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Only pcie 3? Get with the times intel 🙄timecop1818 - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Let's hear about your application which requires more bandwidth than PCIe3 can provide.I never understood all those people who complained about "two thunderbolt lanes" and "only pcie 3" but when asked to provide concrete examples where this would not be enough did not have any.
SSNSeawolf - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
RoCE/iWARP link is a good example. Even a small software-defined storage setup will easily saturate a pair of 50GbE links. 100/200/400 GbE needs PCIe 4 as a practical requirement.ae00711 - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
do be serious - that kind of kit isn't installed in single socket /workstations/. That end of the spectrum is for dual (or more) socket.SSNSeawolf - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
That's a common use case for this stuff. RDMA cards are $300-400. I'm not sure why you think RDMA is so fancy to need dual or quad socket. Run it on an i5 for all it cares.Jorgp2 - Sunday, December 13, 2020 - link
The fuck would you stick a 400GbE card in this board?Slash3 - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
The networking issue may be a result of a faulty 1V/V2 revision i225-V LAN controller chip. When plugged into a switch or router at 2.5Gbit, they have a malformed Inter-Packet Gap that can cause dropout, heavily reduced bandwidth or atrocious latency. It was covered briefly at the time and has since fallen a bit by the wayside, but wouldn't surprise me if it was the root cause.https://www.techpowerup.com/img/immgrcH3WvH9P6o0.j...
Mitigation includes an updated driver or to set it manually to 1Gbit.
As for the atrocious memory support and other problems, those are all on Supermicro.
ae00711 - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
agreed.the one time I needed support from supermicro, un-f88king-believable - worst I've seen from a tech company. I do have a lot of SM mobos (workstation and server), the products are decent for the most part, but you're f88ked if you need support. I try to buy intel and tyan now-a-days.
RU482 - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
With regard to ECC memory...if I have this X12SAE motherboard with a Xeon W-1290E CPU, do I HAVE to use ECC UDIMMS? or will the system operate with more common non-ECC UDIMMS?this would ignore the "Why don't you just use a core i9 instead of W-1290E" question
Alsw - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Those core counts in the table on page 1 are way off for the most part some copy and paste errors e.g. 1290p is 10 cores, 20 threads. Regarding Intel vs AMD Right now it's tricky in the Workststion space companies want the backup of OEM support only lenovo has broken and started offering threadripper Pro which to be honest isn't that compelling. At the low end most are OK without ECC ram so rysen 5000 would do well against i7/i9 workstations from dell/hp lenovo but as soon as you get to things like FEA, CFD other scientific type workloads then ECC is what users are looking for and not all of them need masses of cores it depends on the solver, problem type etc how well it scalesBut A small change from AMD in properly supporting ECC would make a big difference to making inroads
Maybe they are just less focused on this market as their Radeon pro cards fall ever behind NVIDIA Quadro (I refuse to stop using that name as its just crasy to drop such a string brand!)
DracoDan - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Wait... a *PCI* slot?! Like from 1992??? Where did they even find the old-new stock of PCI connectors? Crazy to think that a board that worked in a 486 (albeit a limited subset of 486 systems) can work in this board!Ithaqua - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
There are a few MB makers that still have PCI / PCI-X / AGP Slots.Not sure about VLBus or ISA (8/16) but who needs to install the original soundblaster card or a CGA video card in a new system?
AntonErtl - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
Old slot types are not for sound or video cards, but for specialized boards for interfacing to expensive machinery where the manufacturer charges and arm and a leg for a modern replacement board (if there is one at all), went out of business, was bought up, etc.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - link
Some cards that are still used are only available PCI format.sjkpublic@gmail.com - Friday, December 11, 2020 - link
Great article if one were looking for a low power consumption mobo for W-1270. But that audience must be rather small as there are much better options price/performance wise. Strange.JKJK - Sunday, December 13, 2020 - link
Sensors reading out of range and super doctor beeping is typical with supermicro WS boards. It's pretty annoying, I've had several that showen behaviour like this.lindamyron - Thursday, December 17, 2020 - link
Does the quantity of occupants in nvme openings deduct from the most extreme number of PCIe ways?Regularly a NVMe SSD affiliation space is related by a PCIe x4 interface.
I should use the w-1290t which officially offers Max# of PCIe ways of 16.
I should use two lsi strike controllers, which everyone uses 8x PCIe ways, leaving 0 for the 2 NVMe SSDs, which I should use.
Thankful to you for your help
Linda Myron
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