ASUS X399 ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha Review
Test Setup and Overclocking
Published: 23rd April 2019 | Source: ASUS | Price: |
Test Setup
ASUS X399 ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX
Corsair LPX 2666MHz
Corsair LPX 3200MHz
Corsair MP500 M.2
nVidia GTX 980
Corsair ML Fans
Coolermaster ML360 RGB TR4 AIO Cooler
Overclocking
The key revision on the Alpha version of the Zenith Extreme is the greatly improved power section and VRM cooler. This clearly pays dividends as we could push our Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX all the way to 4 GHz across all 32 cores. That's 64 threads of 4 GHz loveliness for those of you who feel that you haven't got quite enough CPU horsepower. Best of all the fans on the VRM cooler never spun up at all. A win all round.
Most Recent Comments
Another great review TTL style.
You got a bit confused in the video Tom. Slow brain to mouth connection? ![]() IR3555M are smart power stages. They integrate both high, and low side mosfets with additional sensing, and protection circuits into one package. They are those chips above inductors (chokes) at the front. SMDs at the back are capacitors for ironing out the current. Either aluminium polymer, or tantalum. Pretty much all VRM controllers on motherboards have 8 PWM signals. ASUS uses 8 PWM signals with 2 power stages for each signal. And in that case 8 PWM signals interleaving. MSI uses doublers for each PWM signal so in the end there are 16 PWM signals interleaving (one for each power stage). Both VRMs spread the load over 16 power stages for better efficiency. |
I meant to say PWM on the back not mosfet.... Just me being a spaz, I knew what I meant

You got a bit confused in the video Tom. Slow brain to mouth connection?
IR3555M are smart power stages. They integrate both high, and low side mosfets with additional sensing, and protection circuits into one package. They are those chips above inductors (chokes) at the front. SMDs at the back are capacitors for ironing out the current. Either aluminium polymer, or tantalum.
Pretty much all VRM controllers on motherboards have 8 PWM signals. ASUS uses 8 PWM signals with 2 power stages for each signal. And in that case 8 PWM signals interleaving. MSI uses doublers for each PWM signal so in the end there are 16 PWM signals interleaving (one for each power stage). Both VRMs spread the load over 16 power stages for better efficiency.Quote