ASUS X399 ROG Zenith Extreme and Ryzen 1950X Threadripper Review

Test Setup

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X
ASUS X399 ROG Zenith Extreme
Corsair LPX 2666MHz
Corsair LPX 3200MHz
Corsair MP500 M.2
nVidia GTX 980
Corsair HX1000i

Overclocking

If there is one thing we never tire of its pushing even more performance out of something that already has bags of it. The Ryzen 1950X boosts to 3.7 GHz on all cores by default but thanks to the excellent overclocking capabilities of the ASUS Zenith Extreme we were able to take all 16 cores up to 4.2 GHz. Couple that to the 3200 MHz DDR4 speeds but we couldnt quite get this stable enough for our full bench suite and we had to srttle for ‘just’ 4GHz. This could just be early BIOS but considering it stops at the same sort of place that normal Ryzen did with twice as many cores is actually a brilliant result and even with ‘just’ 4GHz we should be in for some eye-wateringly high results in our multi threaded benchmarks.

Temperatures

There is no denying that to extract the most from the combination of the X399 Zenith Extreme and the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X you need seriously good cooling. We think a dual AIO is the bare minimum but you probably should be looking at custom water-cooling should you want to have the most consistent performance. As you can see here the ASUS VRM cooling solution absolutely gets the job done with a maximum of only 57°C, way below many of the recent VRM temperatures we’ve monitored.