At the ASUS suite here at CES 2019, we were witness to the start of a battle between AMD’s X399 motherboard platform, and Intel’s X299 platform. A sort of Alpha vs Omega if you will. Heralded as motherboards for the most discerning gamers, enthusiasts, and overclockers, these two motherboards offer an amazing array of features, that are nearly identical across the two platforms.
The Alpha board will be home to AMD’s X399 chipset and Threadripper CPUs, while the Omega will house Intel’s X299 chipset and Core X-series CPUs. With an impressive eight DDR4 slots and a maximum capacity of 128GB of memory, these motherboards are definitely not slacking. Three M.2 slots are found on the Alpha, while four are available on the Omega.
Each motherboard supports 3-way SLI and 3-way CFX for multi-card graphics setups, and the five PCIe slots on the Alpha and four PCIe slots on the Omega are there to make sure each card has a home.
Other than a few other details, these motherboards are about as close to identical as you can get across platforms. Each offers 16 power stages across eight phases, allowing for better transient response, leading to the motherboard being able to react quickly to changing CPU power demands.
10G Ethernet is present thanks to an Aquantia interface, and Intel Gigabit WiFi is present in a 2×2 MU-MIMO implementation for faster than gigabit speeds.
Keeping these boards cool, and protected, is a plethora of molded aluminum plates and panels. This awesome looking paneling is accented by multiple RGB LED zones, and additional lighting can be added thanks to the standard and addressable RGB headers.
Availability for both boards is expected to be in Q1 of 2019.