AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Unboxing | Hacker News Reader

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Unboxing

anandtech.com

49 pointspiinbinary19 comments

A lot of companies could learn something about packaging from this. Expensive items should come in expensive boxes. Apple has known this for a long time. Cheap packaging leaves the impression that the item within is cheap, which, in turn, leads to dissatisfaction with the purchase. Good packaging has such high return for a relatively small investment.

Edit: Let me clarify that I don't think this is a logical practice, just that from a business perspective it makes sense.

Edit: I am told this packaging is limited to the review chips. I stand by what I said though.

I would feel pretty let down if this thing showed up in what looks like a totally pointless Pelican case. Plastic waste is a huge problem. This type of behavior is not part of the solution.

Might be paper, might be wood... the point is to look expensive, which you can do in a million ways.

It isn't really a logical thing, more of a gut reaction. Also better the packaging be reusable. Even if you have no use for a pelican case I can direct you to a few people (starting with myself) that most definitely do.

Apple's stuff doesn't show up in a Pelican case, but it does have decent-looking packaging that is also minimalist.

I was actually really disappointed by the Apple Watch packaging. I ordered an iPad and I could not believe that the box I received actually contained a 10" iPad. It was so tiny! When I opened it, the box was hardly bigger than the device inside of it. That is super minimalist.

When I got a Macbook, the box again was pretty compact compared to the device inside. Same with the iPhone, to a lesser extent.

But when I got an Apple Watch? Good lord that box was massive. Absolutely massive! They for some reason had to package the band fully extended so the box was longer than my forearm. Complete waste of packaging. I have no idea why they did that.

They want it to feel like a luxury item.

They actually have 2 different boxes, the steel watches have a more square box, with another box inside made of hard plastic. https://youtu.be/uoztkE1KcO0?t=50s

I doubt it'll ship to the public in this sort of case. Seems like priming for the reviewer.

The two small boxes containing one CPU each instead of the large case seem to be the actual retail packaging though. Or so Tom's Hardware's unboxing says.

AMD has always done pretty good on packaging, relative to intel for their retail packages. I remember my prior FX-8350 came in a metal tin.. of course it couldn't be reused (because of the opening to see the cpu), which is the only real shame.

On the flips side, the special edition packaging for Overwatch was so extreme, it just felt really wasteful, as I had no intention of keeping the russian doll boxes in boxes.

I think there's room for something in the middle.

This is a review kit, Anandtech does not own these cpu's. Once done they ship them back to AMD. Pelican cases with foam filling are pretty convenient for that purpose.

Technically AT doesn't own the chips, but rarely does AMD request them to be returned from such a large site. Intel does recall chips from smaller publications for regional sampling, but the big guns always keep the chips for regression testing later.

Please add “Unboxing” to the title. This isn't the full AnandTech review.

The real intrigue for me is the 1900X which is 8-core similar to 1800X, 1700X and 1700. I understand the 1900X will use the ThreadRipper MoBo, giving it access to 60 pci-express lanes. What could be the best use of this say compared to the X370 Mobo and its 16-something pci-express lanes ?

3 GPUs at x16 and some leftovers for SSDs and such.

Anything that uses lots of GPUs and actually needs to quickly transfer data from and to GPUs is going to profit a lot from more PCIe lanes. Renderfarms and Deep Learning come to mind.

Not just lots of PCI-E lanes, but quad channel memory too. It's a smart move by AMD.

Enthusiasts will build systems with 3 x GPUS (16 PCIe 3.0 lanes each) + 2 x M.2 (4x PCIe each) = 56 PCIe lanes, just for peripherals. Workstations might use one or more 10GbE (4x PCIe each) and even 40Gb/s infiniband devices (8x or more PCIe.)

Not hard to use these up when you're going big.

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