Now that I had time to compare Asus Alpha and MSI MEG, I can tell you few things:
- with both you can see how little attention and support goes into them. Alpha came out half a year later than MEG and it's been almost one year since...and it still has actually problematic (and very sporadically updated) BIOS.
- I was always fan of Asus UEFI layout, but at the moment I can't say it's any better than MSI MEG, both became "RGB-ized" metaphorically by being overly flashy to detriment of finding what you need quickly. I also hate how randomly are things organized in both boards.
- VRM is good enough for overclock to same extent as MEG. Same seem to go for the whole power cascade.
- Memory support is very much identical, so I guess this is purely a Threadripper thing. The Asus was budget build, so of course I bought regular Micron/Hynix (no idea which) from Kingston (128GB Kit for 700 Euro is as good a deal as it gets, no reason to hunt for overpriced discontinued B-Die sets). It boots just fine at 2933/3000 CL15, but it isn't stable there. Compromise of slightly lower clock or less tight timings or much higher voltage and you are good to go. No performance loss here.
I am actually in awe how relatively modest U14S TR4 can cool this CPU, probably all due to size of heatspreader. AMD did a really good decision here, but I would love Noctua to get in bit of hurry and give us NH-D15.
With Threadripper, it's all about overall airflow anyway. Board, VRM and specifically memory can get much hotter than the CPU, so this is first build where case fans are running faster then the single A15 on heatsink (800rpm vs 600rpm in Fractal Define R6)
Since my current opinion is that it's absolutely not worth overclocking Threadripper since your single-core turbo is already capped at stock (4.1 +/- GHz), and additional 5-8perc. of multithreaded performance is not worth additional 250W of heat & noise since you should have render farm for this anyway, I highly suggest to just stick to air-cooling, even for upcoming Threadrippers. I wouldn't be surprised if air-tower is just fine for at least the 48core version or whatever will come.
My plan is now to take Veronika's 2990WX out of her loop, place it into Define R6 just like the Asus build, keep both in render-farm and rebuild her loop into my case (LianLi 3000) for the upcoming January Threadrippers, since that case lets me have separate airflow for rads and case.