MOTHERBOARDS Asus Prime X399 $350

IF YOU’RE GOING with the mighty powerhouse of Threadripper, you need a suitable motherboard. We admit, there’s not a huge selection of X399 boards out there right now (seven in total), so pickings are slim, but that’s not to say there’s no choice to be had. In our opinion, Asus’s Prime X399 is ideal. For this number of cores, unless you have very specific needs (overclocking, more PCIe SSDs, specific storage solutions, and so on), there’s very little to justify investing in a pricier motherboard.

Asus’s Prime X399 was the board we chose for our recent workstation rendering machine, because of these very reasons. We wanted to keep an eye on the price, yet still have access to a fantastically smooth BIOS for additional tweaking, overclocking, and more if we needed it. Throw in the gorgeously understated color scheme and design of the board, plus cooling and storage support, and it’s an all-around no-brainer.

That said, one of the biggest reasons we chose this board is due to market share. Why? Simply put, Asus has loads of money and resources to invest in BIOS development, pushing the boundaries of memory support in the process—and good memory support is still key to unlocking the real potential of AMD’s potent processor. Stability is also an important factor, and you can max both of those factors out using this powerful motherboard. Throw in the strong feature set and raw power on offer, and this is an easy recommendation to make.