Image: Wccftech
Wccftech has released images of an unreleased MSI WRX80 motherboard. The PCB suggests the name as “WS WRX80”. This comes shortly after AMD’s announcement of the Threadripper 5000 Pro series and appears to be the board used in Lenovo’s newest P620 Workstation.
Image: wccftech
Image: ASUS
Specifications
A comparison to ASUS’ WRX80 offering, released in January 2021, reveals a lot of similarities, the MSI WRX80 motherboard offers 7 PCIe 4.0 x16 16x slots, as reported by Wccftech. Other specs include an 11 Phase VRM with 105A Smart Power Stages. These are probably Renesas RAA22010540s controlled by an RAA229131. I do think that the number of stages is somewhat unusual, with the ASUS Sage having 16 90A smart power stages, but the stages could be with teamed power stages. Additionally, the usage of SMD capacitors is also helpful for transient response. The board has an 14 layer PCB, 2 PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots, 8 SATA connectors, 2 U.2 connectors. It has dual LAN with one 10G controller, and IPMI support over an Aspeed AST2600.
Looking at the PCB, there are 6 case fan headers, 2 CPU fan headers and a flow meter header. Internal I/O is covered by 2 USB 2.0 headers and 1 USB 3.2 header, for type-c. It also features a 4-pin RGB header. Debug features include a power and reset button, a post code, debug LEDs, and a few switches, with only an IPMI switch labeled. A fan is cooling the chipset.
In conclusion, the MSI WRX80 motherboard looks to be a capable workstation board, although I am unsure about why they’d release a board so similar to a competitor’s this late into the release cycle. It is pretty obvious that it’s here to ride the Threadripper 5000 wave.
