Motherboards for Kabylake-X

[Jito463]

1 minute ago, TidaLWaveZ said:

the best marketing people money can buy?

Throwing a bunch of money at something, doesn't guarantee you get the best results.

[79wjd]

11 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

Throwing a bunch of money at something, doesn't guarantee you get the best results.

While that's certainly true, Intel surely believed KBX would be a profitable endeavor otherwise they wouldn't have invested anything into it. And consiering the fact that HEDT CPUs sound superior (X > K, higher clockspeeds, x299 > z270), I have no trouble believing that naive/uninformed consumers will fall into marketing and buy a 7740x+X299 board rather than a 7700k+Z270 board. Look how many people thought the FX series was so much better than an i5/i7 for gaming because they were clocked higher and with more cores. 

 

I would also believe that some people would buy a 7740x has a temporary solution until they could afford a better X299 CPU -- of course (or see if they need more than a 4c cpu by starting with a 4c cpu and having an upgrade path if they decide they need more), AMD now being in play affects the efficacy of that latter one as a temporary cpu is predicated a bit on nothing better/cheaper being released in the interim. 

[Jito463]

18 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

I have no trouble believing that naive/uninformed consumers will fall into marketing

Oh, I concur.  My only point was that just because they have a lot of money, doesn't mean they can't screw up a product launch.

[TidaLWaveZ]

23 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

Throwing a bunch of money at something, doesn't guarantee you get the best results.

Well it's obvious that if intel would fire their marketing people and hire some people from this forum that they'd be a lot better off.

[NumLock21]

Intel Kabylake X

 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

1 hour ago, TidaLWaveZ said:

Isn't it crazy how so many people on this forum know so much more than some of the best marketing people money can buy?

While it's not unreasonable to assume Intel went through some thoughtful decision process to design its 2066 lineup, possib;y involving additional constraints and problems not apparent to the general public, "they are reach so they must be doing the best thing evah" fails miserably as an argument. AS in, it's not even an argument.

 

Notice that you don't need anyone at Intel to be stupid in order to end up with a stupid product. You just need said stupid product to be the best decision they could come up with given their goal, available information, and constraints.

Same as AMD, a smaller yet still huge company, releasing 220W AM3+ CPUs: you could say "they've got money, it must be great, people in this forum think they know better LOL", or you could accept that all their smart people may have come to the conclusion that releasing a senseless product was the right way to maximize profits / cut back on losses.

 

TL;DR: Intel having billions and a great marketing tema is not incompatible with people posting here being right in their criticism/questioning. They may be wrong, and arguments supporting the claim that they are wrong are welcome. THe "Intel's moneyz" fallacy just isn't one.

[TidaLWaveZ]

4 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

snip

Never took anyone's right to have an opinion away.

 

My criticism of those who act like they know better than high level intel marketing makes every bit of sense when the people criticizing intel have no idea of the plethora of factors involved in the whole process from R&D to the point where the product is actually sold.

 

It's easy to say you could have done better when you are looking back in hindsight.

 

[Dash Lambda]

1 hour ago, TidaLWaveZ said:

Never took anyone's right to have an opinion away.

 

My criticism of those who act like they know better than high level Intel marketing makes every bit of sense when the people criticizing Intel have no idea of the plethora of factors involved in the whole process from R&D to the point where the product is actually sold.

 

It's easy to say you could have done better when you are looking back in hindsight.

In all fairness, I think Kabylake-X is the closest a CPU has come so far to being an unplanned, last-minute reaction. Microarchitectures and dies require a lot of R&D, but all they really did here was stick in onto a different substrate. It still required thought and planning, but only a fraction as much as a normal release.

[Marinatall_Ironside]

8 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

While that's certainly true, Intel surely believed KBX would be a profitable endeavor otherwise they wouldn't have invested anything into it. And consiering the fact that HEDT CPUs sound superior (X > K, higher clockspeeds, x299 > z270), I have no trouble believing that naive/uninformed consumers will fall into marketing and buy a 7740x+X299 board rather than a 7700k+Z270 board. Look how many people thought the FX series was so much better than an i5/i7 for gaming because they were clocked higher and with more cores. 

 

I would also believe that some people would buy a 7740x has a temporary solution until they could afford a better X299 CPU -- of course (or see if they need more than a 4c cpu by starting with a 4c cpu and having an upgrade path if they decide they need more), AMD now being in play affects the efficacy of that latter one as a temporary cpu is predicated a bit on nothing better/cheaper being released in the interim. 

The first paragraph is definitely true. If you've been following me in the "Experiences With Nontechies" thread, you may have come across a story where I tried to talk a streamer out of buying KBL-X + X299 only to get banned from the Twitch chat and the associated Discord server, blocked on my public Twitter account (which is @OfficialJurunce if you asked me). The streamer was also trying to wave their CompSci degree as if they know it all (which is not always the case) and they're making the world's smartest decision in computer building. The only reason why the streamer got that degree was because they got good grades in their classes, that's all. Beyond that, just throw it out the window. I also would really like to make a response stream to her demonstrating a Ryzen build that's perfectly reasonable, but is objectively better by a really good margin for a similar price - hell even less! But I don't have the money on hand to build a PC like that. 

 

I do understand that her computer is failing (dead USB ports and sluggish performance overall), but that is no reason to act like a dick to someone who is trying to help out by not making stupid purchasing decisions like buying X299 + KBL-X. If you want to offend (and piss off) a well-informed person, ask them if they're going to college.

 

For the second paragraph, I will have to disagree. If you're buying into X299, you should really be buying an i7-7800X bare minimum if you're going to be using the features that most X299 motherboards have, otherwise you'll be wasting features for no reason.

 

I still wholeheartedly believe that these KBL-X exclusive motherboards and the KBL-X architecture should not even exist in the first place, given the specifications. All they have to offer is a higher TDP and a slight bump in frequency, otherwise there's literally nothing different compared to KBL-S on the Z270 platform. At least AMD is getting it right with their upcoming Ryzen Threadripper 1900X. While that's an 8-core part, it does have 64 PCIe lanes and quad-channel memory support for those who don't need the extra cores, but needs the memory bandwidth and the I/O that the X399 chipset brings to the table.

Edited August 7, 2017 by JurunceNK

[Sauron]

On 4/8/2017 at 8:47 PM, The Benjamins said:

WHY, so you don't even have a upgrade path.

You can still run the higher core count variants, if you don't need the platform features you could save quite a lot on the motherboard.

 

But yeah, x299 is a clusterfuck.

[Marinatall_Ironside]

2 minutes ago, Sauron said:

You can still run the higher core count variants, if you don't need the platform features you could save quite a lot on the motherboard.

I really doubt that. MSI and Gigabyte could run a special BIOS on their motherboards that specifically will not work with Skylake-X.

[79wjd]

5 minutes ago, JurunceNK said:

The streamer was also trying to wave their CompSci degree as if they know it all (which is not always the case)

I'm a CS major myself, and I can tell you from personal experience that the average CS major knows fuck-all about computers.

5 minutes ago, JurunceNK said:

For the second paragraph, I will have to disagree. If you're buying into X299, you should really be buying an i7-7800X bare minimum if you're going to be using the features that most X299 motherboards have, otherwise you'll be wasting features for no reason.

 

I still wholeheartedly believe that these KBL-X exclusive motherboards and the KBL-X architecture should not even exist in the first place, given the specifications. All they have to offer is a higher TDP and a slight bump in frequency, otherwise there's literally nothing different compared to KBL-S on the Z270 platform. At least AMD is getting it right with their upcoming Ryzen Threadripper 1900X. While that's an 8-core part, it does have 64 PCIe lanes and quad-channel memory support for those who don't need the extra cores, but needs the memory bandwidth and the I/O that the X399 chipset brings to the table.

It's certainly better to wait and buy something proper, but plenty of people bought a G3258 as a stop gap cpu until they could afford a 4790k. Of course, a 7740x is a bit of a different story due to costing a lot more money, but I also believe that the target audience still exists (its just smaller). Then there are also people who are starting out in something and they only need/can afford four cores now, but in the future that might change -- so paying an extra $100 to have the ability to upgrade without replacing the motherboard is something for some people. Of course, there are also alternatives to Intel, but Intel is kind of banking on brand loyalty. 

[Marinatall_Ironside]

Just now, djdwosk97 said:

I'm a CS major myself, and I can tell you from personal experience that the average CS major knows fuck-all about computers.

 

It's certainly better to wait and buy something proper, but plenty of people bought a G3258 as a stop gap cpu until they could afford a 4790k. Of course, a 7740x is a bit of a different story due to costing a lot more money, but I also believe that the target audience still exists (its just smaller). Then there are also people who are starting out in something and they only need/can afford four cores now, but in the future that might change -- so paying an extra $100 to have the ability to upgrade without replacing the motherboard is something for some people. Of course, there are also alternatives to Intel, but Intel is kind of banking on brand loyalty. 

Well with you being a CS major, you were never my concern, and I'll most likely trust your knowledge in the CS field better than that one streamer I was talking about. It's just this one streamer was very off-putting, and I no longer have any respect for her.

 

For all intents and purposes, yes there's that target audience like you said, but I still believe that for whatever purpose, it's still better to wait and save up some extra money if you can get that much better performance and value. A lot of people also do some long-term planning and if they don't need more cores now, it's always better to have those extra cores in the future without having to make those unnecessary upgrades (because that's downtime right there).

 

To be clear, for streaming and gaming at the same time, more cores is always better. It also doesn't matter if you're not dropping frames, if your stream output to the viewer is sluggish, then it's not a good-quality stream because then it becomes an issue of whether the streamer can sustain the 60 FPS 16.7 ms frametime target at x resolution and y bitrate using the x264 encoder. You can compensate for this by lowering the bitrate, but then the stream quality has to suffer as well to make up the difference in the reduced workload that a lower bitrate offers. There's also hardware encoders (like Nvidia NVENC or AMD VCE), but then you're using dGPU resources that would otherwise be better used on games that are really demanding to run.

 

This article gives much better insight into streaming and gaming at the same that I'm trying to drive home (which is for gaming and streaming (the use case), for a similar price, AMD at this time is objectively better). I also stream and tinker with my OBS settings as well. Mind you their testing isn't 100% perfect (because they were having account-side issues with Twitch, so they had to scrap the results and go with YouTube gaming instead), but you'll get what I'm saying here.

 

http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2993-amd-1700-vs-intel-7700k-for-game-streaming

[Sauron]

22 minutes ago, JurunceNK said:

I really doubt that. MSI and Gigabyte could run a special BIOS on their motherboards that specifically will not work with Skylake-X.

Well they could... but why would they?

[Marinatall_Ironside]

Just now, Sauron said:

Well they could... but why would they?

If the advertising on the boxes say "Supports Intel Core i7-7740X & i5-7640X Only", wouldn't it occur to someone that that's how the board's BIOS is configured?

[SpaceGhostC2C]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

Well they could... but why would they?

Power delivery. They could cheap out on VRM knowing it's 4 cores max. Even if the VRMs themselves are fine for the first few Skylake-X models at stock, they may choose to avoid to many RMAs from overclockers or people stressing the Skylakes too much.

It wouldn't be different from some AM3+ boards having restricted lineup support (even excluding the 9xxx series), although in most cases the CPUs work, but at your own risk (which in the 9xxx case includes VRMs bursting in flames ).

Knowing it's Kaby Lake-X only allows them to cut costs much more, and restricting it at BIOS would be insurance against people trying to RMA boards they've killed by going out of the supported list.

[Dreaper]

On 8/4/2017 at 2:44 PM, NumLock21 said:

When Intel has launched their X299 platform, it had received a warm welcome of head scratching and face palms. The platform, was the very first to mix mainstream processors along with the enthusiast. On the mainstream, there was the core i5 7640X and Core i7 7740x. Both of them are exactly the same as their socket 1151 skus, with a few minor difference like clock speed and TDP, but the number of cpu lanes is still stuck at 16 PCIe 3.0 and dual channel ram. This lead to having a board, where half of the ram slots not working, and forced some of the features on the board to disabled, due to lack of cpu lanes. Because of this, Gigabyte and MSI have come with a board that's specifically made only for Kabylake-X. Gigabyte revealed their ATX Aorus, while MSI went with a more simple microATX. The board looks just like the mainstream 1151, except for the huge 2066 socket, and should probably come at a lower cost, compared to the full X299 boards.

With 1151, with 300 series chipset to support hexacore processors, not sure where these kabylake-x board stands, since they don't allow the upgrade path, to the 6 core skylake-x.

 

 

 

https://videocardz.com/71656/x299-kabylake-x-only-motherboards-are-here

 

has anyone said the best boards for the skylake x?

[79wjd]

8 minutes ago, JurunceNK said:

Well with you being a CS major, you were never my concern, and I'll most likely trust your knowledge in the CS field better than that one streamer I was talking about. It's just this one streamer was very off-putting, and I no longer have any respect for her.

No, as in, most CS majors don't know anything about computers. 

 

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, JurunceNK said:

If the advertising on the boxes say "Supports Intel Core i7-7740X & i5-7640X Only", wouldn't it occur to someone that that's how the board's BIOS is configured?

It could also be because, since they aren't targeted at the higher end models and don't support many of their features, they weren't even tested with the motherboard and the manufacturer takes no responsibilty for any problems with them. It wouldn't be the first time it happens. What's supported is simply what is tested and MUST work (if it doesn't the manufacturer has to fix it) with that board.

2 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Power delivery. They could cheap out on VRM knowing it's 4 cores max. Even if the VRMs themselves are fine for the first few Skylake-X models at stock, they may choose to avoid to many RMAs from overclockers or people stressing the Skylakes too much.

It wouldn't be different from some AM3+ boards having restricted lineup support (even excluding the 9xxx series), although in most cases the CPUs work, but at your own risk (which in the 9xxx case includes VRMs bursting in flames ).

Knowing it's Kaby Lake-X only allows them to cut costs much more, and restricting it at BIOS would be insurance against people trying to RMA boards they've killed by going out of the supported list.

That's true, but these are still adaptations of pretty good z270 motherboards so the VRMs should be good enough for the 6 or 8 core models at stock clocks. I can see why they wouldn't explicitly support them, but I don't think they'd need to block them in the bios.

[Marinatall_Ironside]

1 minute ago, djdwosk97 said:

No, as in, most CS majors don't know anything about computers. 

If that's the case, I'll bet they'll know more about networking, administration, and virtualization better than someone like me with no experience in that field, but computers on the other hand, well, you can fill in the blanks. So someone like you can help me out with these things unless I declare a CS major and switch over from my multimedia major (which is always an option as I do have an interest in computers).

[NumLock21]

1 hour ago, Dreaper said:

has anyone said the best boards for the skylake x?

X299 that supports it.

[Jito463]

2 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

No, as in, most CS majors don't know anything about computers. 

 

Several years ago, while working in Des Moines doing computer repair, I made the mistake of offending the parent of a CS major.  They brought a computer in for service, and mentioned that their son (a CS major, as they explicitly pointed out) had looked at it.  I made an off-hand comment that having such a degree doesn't necessarily mean one knows about computer repair, since they're different fields.  It wasn't intended to be mean or condescending, just a statement of fact.

 

You've likely never seen anyone get so upset quite so fast, as when I "insulted" her son.