hey guys tiago with pc world here today we're going to talk about the high-end desktop as it
pertains to motherboards have motherboards in the mainstream cpu lineup such as intel's z690
amd's x570 have mainstream motherboards caught up in enough features and performance to be able
to justify fully moving for most users to the mainstream platforms or is there going to be a
large gap a lot of users not satisfied with what's currently going on something that traditionally
was only fulfilled by things such as threadripper or intel's x-core platform so let's get started
so let's do just a brief history as to why the mainstream cpus have replaced
what used to be very high core count and expensive cpus for users in the past let's go back to around
the time of intel's x99 platform you guys will remember that had the 6950x 10 core processor
used to be a mighty two thousand dollars so that was when cpus were outrageously expensive for not
really that high core count of course nowadays you can get considerably faster cpus for much cheaper
first probably less importantly that really was the high-end gaming desktop for a lot of people
anytime you saw some of the most over-the-top gaming builds not workstation most likely they
had an x99 platform even though intel's mainstream lineup such as z170 z270 those really were the
ones that were geared towards specifically gaming the second and this is probably definitely going
to be more important would be the users using it for workstation use generally you're going
to be able to get a lot faster multi-core cpus especially back then something like the 6950x was
expensive but a 10 core cpu back during that time was certainly a lot more impressive than it would
be now so for workstation use you're going to have more of those multi-core cpus available on these
high-end desktops and then of course they're also going to have basically what are the two
other more important elements that's going to be more pcie lanes than the mainstream desktops for
users using workstations with back then multiple gpus now it could be a capture card or a lot
of nvme drives and also memory support is very important as time went by and definitely thanks
to amd's ryzen which brought many multi-core cpu at much more reasonable prices we finally reached
a point where something like amd's ryzen 9 5950x which with its 16 cores and 32 threads was able
to generally beat something from intel's x-core lineup something like the 10-980 xc so mainstream
cpus especially with the advent of these ryzen 9 processors certainly started to become very
attractive for most users not only that for gamers the market completely disappeared for the high-end
desktop now with amd's ryzen and even intel z690 platform such as the 12900k you get great
multi-threaded performance and really great single core speeds that are going to be very important
for gaming and of course this goes without saying that typically mainstream cpus also come at much
better pricing something like a threadripper will be well over a thousand dollars and another
big reason for the demise of hedt during the last several years with massive chip shortages
it makes sense for a lot of these companies to focus either on the mainstream lineup like z690
x 570 or on the more lucrative and very high-end market like epic and xeon cpus so those users in
the middle that needed workstations with a certain amount of memory or pcie lane you really got stuck
sort of choosing between both of them and we know that even something that was pretty popular
with most people such as fedripper has basically disappeared from the market if you search yourself
or recently puget system sort of analyzed what's going on with their sales in terms of workstations
and they said that even them have a very hard time actually acquiring these threadripper cpus
therefore people either have to go to the extreme high end like the server class cpus or make do
with the current mainstream lineup but recently we have seen some sightings of threadripper pro
5000 that's supposedly going to be released first you'll see it in some workstations like from dell
and lenovo and we don't know if that's going to be released into the wider do-it-yourself market
aside from these couple of system builders let's see specifically with motherboards what features
are available on the mainstream compared to what would be available on a high-end platform
and we'll see if that's going to be enough for certain users and which users may actually be left
out in the dark let's say if we take one of the more modern mainstream motherboards something like
a z690 asus extreme now off the bat if we ask the question has this motherboard caught up to hedt
motherboards it's a little bit misleading because first this is going to have some technology that
was never even existed on the older motherboards so let's address some of the important differences
first is going to be the ram wow ddr5 is definitely the bleeding edge and it's going
to be great for gaming in many applications definitely a lot of diminishing returns and in
general you're not going to get the same capacity capability as with something like ddr4 that's been
around much longer certainly a lot more stable in terms of workstation use as well primarily users
are going to be looking at that limit but most mainstream platforms like z690 and x570 you're
going to be limited to maybe like 128 gigabytes of ram which is certainly enough for a gaming build
and even most workstations but some users may need significantly more ram and of course things like
ecc memory things that are generally not going to be found on the consumer grade mainstream desktops
may certainly be more important for certain workstation users and it's going to take
precedence over any newer technology that may be available on those motherboards and of course
the list of advantages on the high-end desktop certainly don't stop there for example most of
them will have eight dimm slots allowing you to have that quad channel memory while most of these
sort of mainstream platforms are just gonna have dual channel memory even with improved mainstream
ram capabilities you still need something like a threadripper without of course going to xeon
or epic which you can push it even further and much like the ram capability we mentioned the
cpu history and how it's evolved over time that most users are fine with the mainstream platform
but some users who need maybe 34 or 64 cores or more such as available on the threadripper
platform it's not even going to be a question for them to go on the mainstream platform they simply
need that core count for their specific workload where something like a 5950x is just not going
to cut it with 16 core 32 thread even a 12 900k with its very high performing single core speeds
definitely not going to be enough for that user if they rely for their workflow for something like 32
64 cores so that'll certainly be a very easy criteria for a user to be able to decide which
platform is certainly going to be best another vital area where mainstream motherboards have not
exactly caught up with sort of threadripper and the older hddt platforms that's going to be in
pcie lanes now these are vitally important and of course running sli nobody does that
anymore for gaming aside from some very specific benchmarks and things of that nature but a lot
of users do use multi gpu sometimes even for gpus for workstation uses things like machine learning
ai there's various things even video rendering things like davinci resolve certainly will scale
with multiple gpus and typically a mainstream motherboard will be able to do maybe two but
the pcie lanes are going to be a lot more limited with something like threadripper you're able to go
with as many as 88 pcie lanes even more on the threadripper pro lineup of cpus and it's also
going to leave you plenty of room for different capture cards various pcie cards even pcie nvme
raid cards if you need a lot of fast storage and of course those boards typically will have a lot
of nvme drives as well even if things aren't generation five having more pcie lanes even at
generation four like threadripper offers for pcie that's going to be vitally more important because
then you're not going to be limited by the amount of things that you can connect to the motherboard
so for those users that really need those pcie lanes especially to get the full performance from
each of those lanes things like threadripper are really going to be the only alternative so those
are going to be some of the vital areas that are going to be important for a certain class of users
who it's not enough to go to mainstream because you're going to be limited by limitations like as
memory pcie lanes even the core count on certain cpus as good as mainstream is now it certainly is
not going to fulfill that same level as something like a threadripper or even the previous x-core
processors would now without having to go to the epic and xeon processors which are going to get
much more expensive it's going to be a completely different platform to answer the question of the
video in some regards mainstream platforms for most users have even surpassed hedt but
there certainly is one huge caveat for some of the traditional workstation users that definitely need
much more than mainstream can offer the answer will be no it really hasn't even come close to
fulfilling some of those necessities that sort of the hedt used to give a lot of those users
so those users definitely have a pretty tough choice you either stay on mainstream with some
limitations try to find whatever is left of threadripper products if you need it now or
maybe wait for the new ones that are coming out which may still be hard to source or if
it's really mission critical you may just have to step up to the much more expensive server
line platforms alright guys let us know what you think down below are you one of those users that
just need a workstation like a threadripper level in order to get your work done let us know what
you think remember to subscribe for more videos like this and we'll see you guys on the next video