Motherboards

Asus just announced the ProART B550-Creator, the first AM4 motherboard to come with Thunderbolt 4 support. The motherboard will be available next month with a price tag of $299. Like its other ProART motherboards, the ProART B550-Creator arrives with a minimalistic design that features a black exterior accented by gold accents. The motherboard employs a powerful 12+2-phase power delivery subsystem that's cooled by a pair of thick heatsinks. The motherboard feeds the processor with a combination of a 8-pin EPS and 4-pin ATX power connectors. On the memory side, the ProART B550-Creator is equipped with four DDR4 memory slots and accommodates up to 128GB of memory. However, Asus didn't specify up to what memory frequencies are supported. Storage-wise, the ProART B550-Creator offers four normal SATA III connectors for conventional hard drives and SSDs. There are also a pair of M.2 ports for high-speed storage. Logically, the primary M.2 port adheres to the PCIe 4.0 x4 interface, … [Read more...] about Asus Launches First AMD B550 Thunderbolt 4 Motherboard

MSI has officially unlocked PCIe Gen 4.0 support for Intel's upcoming Rocket Lake CPUs that will soon vie for a spot on our list of Best CPUs . The update comes through new BIOS updates for MSI's entire Z490 lineup, following up on Z490's potential to bring PCIe 4.0 support to Rocket Lake platforms. MSI says it designed its Z490 boards specifically for Gen 4.0 support from the very beginning by implementing " PCIe 4.0 ready clock generator, lane switch, redriver, PCIe slots, and M.2 connectors." You can see the list of supported motherboards below. Of course, other manufacturers have designed their Z490 motherboards for Gen 4.0 support, but it remains to be seen whether these manufacturers will fully support PCIe 4.0 in all areas or if it will be supported in a limited capacity, say only on certain slots. We've reached out to MSI for clarification on the matter. At least we know for certain that MSI is living up to Z490's promise by providing PCIe Gen 4.0 support to … [Read more...] about MSI Unlocks PCIe 4.0 Support on Z490 Motherboards

AMD announced today that the Threadripper Pro desktop processors, which top out with 64 cores and 128 threads with the Threadripper Pro 3995WX , are now available for purchase worldwide. These chips were previously exclusively available in Lenovo's ThinkStation P620 workstation that we recently reviewed , but the chips and the accompanying WRX80 motherboards are now available at retailers. These chips had already popped up at a few retailers in January, and AMD had previously shared the official pricing for the Threadripper Pro lineup , which you can see below. MSRP/RCP Cores / Threads Base / Boost (GHz) L3 Cache (MB) PCIe DRAM TDP Threadripper Pro 3995WX $5,489 64 / 128 2.7 / 4.2 256 128 Gen 4 Eight-Channel DDR4-3200 280W Threadripper 3990X $3,990 64 / 128 2.9 / 4.3 256 88 Gen 4 (72 Usable) Quad DDR4-3200 280W EPYC 7442 $6,950 64 / 128 2.25 / 3.4 256 128 Gen 4 Eight-Channel … [Read more...] about AMD Announces Global Retail Availability of Threadripper Pro

Update 1/26/21 4:40pm PT: AMD reached out to share the official pricing for the Threadripper Pro series chips, which falls at slightly lower pricing than the Compusource listings we discovered. Here's the official recommended pricing: Cores / Threads SEP (Suggested Pricing) Threadripper Pro 3995WX 64 / 128 $5,489 Threadripper Pro 3975WX 32 / 64 $2,749 Threadripper Pro 3955WX 16 / 32 $1,149 Original Article, slightly amended for clarity : AMD recently announced that it's Threadripper Pro processors will come to retail outlets, but the company hasn't listed the official pricing yet. Seeing these chips come to retail outlets is a nice addition after they debuted for the first six months in uber-expensive pre-validated systems, like the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 that we recently tested with the flagship Threadripper Pro 3995WX . Thanks to a listing of the Threadripper Pro part numbers (via @momomo_us ), we've now tracked down … [Read more...] about Official AMD Threadripper Pro Pricing: $5,489 for 64 Cores, $2,749 for 32 Cores (Updated)

Gone are the days of bulky, clunky, and slow hard drives. Today, storage is all about solid-state drives , which are faster, more reliable, smaller, and — most importantly — much more affordable than they were even five years ago. Even cheap laptops come standard with SSDs nowadays, and whether you’re looking to upgrade your computer’s storage or you’re building a PC from scratch, there are always cheap SSD deals out there to be had for savvy shoppers. Even better? We’ve already rounded them all up right here in one place: Today’s best SSD deals Silicon Power 256GB 2.5 Inch Internal SSD — $32 Teamgroup GX2 512GB 2.5-Inch Internal SSD — $50 , was $53 Western Digital WD Blue SN550 NVMe M.2 2280 1TB Internal Solid State Drive — $105 , was $130 SK Hynix Gold P31 1TB M.2 Internal SSD — $135 , was $225 SanDisk 1TB Extreme Portable SSD — $150 , was $250 Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 Internal SSD — $150 , was $170 Samsung … [Read more...] about Best cheap SSD deals for March 2021