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Value, Conclusions, and Going Forward
As we mentioned before, this thoroughbred Asus X399 Zenith Extreme Alpha is in a league of its own, and that pedigree comes at a cost. Even compared to the more well-equipped competitors (Gigabyte’s Xtreme and ASRock Professional Gaming), the almost USD $200 premium strips away the value consideration as we traditionally score it. Those dollars can go a long way in today’s market bumping builders up to higher-end GPUs, CPUs, additional NVMe, or other specialized components. Even if we want to talk cooling enhancements, dumping an additional 200 USD into blocks, fittings, and radiators can stretch a long way.
The experience we’ve had with the Asus X399 Zenith Extreme Alpha has been a great one, except for when swapping in different DIMMs for testing. As a builder, this system might be overkill, but for reviewers or professional overclockers, there is a reason the industry often gravitates towards Asus.
Back to Threadripper in 2019: Amazon’s Prime Day deals and the deep discounts we are seeing on 1st and 2nd generation Threadrippers lead us to believe there is now a value argument to be had in this HEDT platform. More importantly, content creators that were hesitant to invest in the platform now have options to increase their workflow and creative capacity. If we take Ryzen 3000 pricing into account, this $600 motherboard is on par with some of the competing “mainstream” X570 offerings. Would you rather buy a $500 Threadripper 2950X and $300 X399 motherboard, or $500 Ryzen 3900X and $300 X570 board? What makes sense will of course depend on what you want to do with your system and build. Let us know where you stand in the comment threads in the forums.
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