Asus Zenith II Extreme Alpha
The ultimate motherboard for the ultimate CPU.
Just a generation ago $1,000+ motherboards were seen as lunacy, but with the utter dominance AMD currently has over the very high end market, suddenly a board like the Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha isn’t so ridiculous anymore. If you’re going to go down the 64-core Threadripper route then you need a serious board that’s top shelf in every way. The Alpha lives up to its extreme name. It’s pretty much got the best of everything. We think you’ll be hard pressed to find a more capable motherboard, whether it’s for an ultraenthusiast monster system, a machine learning computational powerhouse or a multi GPU rendering mega workstation. This is a board that can do it all.
The ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha (we’ll call it the Alpha) is an updated version of the Zenith II Extreme that was released with the lower core-count TR processors. The headline difference is the redesigned VRM system with 16 power stages each capable of delivering 90 amps of clean current. With dual 8+8+6 pin power connectors, this is a board that truly supports 64-core overclocking, and it’s all cooled by an especially robust cooling system. With all the metal heatsinks all over the board, it’s very heavy indeed.
We’d need to take up half of this entire issue to talk about what this board has. In short, there are 4x 16x slots and it can take up to 5x M.2 SSDs, all which are all wired with PCIe 4.0 of course. Then there’s eight SATA ports, Wi-Fi 6, 10G Aquantia LAN, loads of USB 3.2 and more.
Most of the specifications from the non-Alpha have been carried over. Though some may question why Asus would include things like the OLED display or RGB on a platform that has its roots in the enterprise space.
As you can see in our review of the 3990X in this issue, the performance on offer is nothing short of ground-breaking in applications that can make use of 128 threads. But, all this threading power leaves performance quite unbalanced. There is still some way to go before the software really catches up. We compared the Alpha to the MSI Creator TRX40 and got interesting results. There was quite a lot of variation across different multiple benchmark runs, perhaps this is another indicator that Windows needs some fine tuning to get the most out of a 128-thread processor.
The Alpha is the ultimate motherboard for the ultimate CPU. Actually we think it might be one of those very rare PC parts that will hold a lot of its value in the years to come. TRX40 boards will always be rare, and the Alpha is amongst the rarest of the lot.
There’s not really all that much to say beyond a lot of superlatives. There just might be motherboards that match the Alpha, but it’ll be tough to beat it. It’s got the connectivity, expandability, refinement and customisation options and yes, the good looks that are worthy of a very high end desktop. It’s a technological tour de force and it’s almost like a statement from Asus: “Look at what we can do”. Sure, it’s total overkill and overpriced for 99.9 % of users, but who cares about that when you’re talking about the best.