The AMD TRX40 Motherboard Overview: 12 New Motherboards Analyzed
by Gavin Bonshor on November 28, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- AMD
- MSI
- Gigabyte
- ASRock
- Asus
- TRX40
- Threadripper 3000
- Castle Peak
GIGABYTE TRX40 Designare
The last of GIGABYTE's four announced TRX40 models is the GIGABYTE TRX40 Designare which takes a more professional approach for content creators and workstation users. With a more subtle and elegant black and silver theme, the Designare looks to feature the basic necessities such as an Intel Gigabit Ethernet controller and Realtek ALC4050H and ALC1220 pairing for the onboard audio. Differentiating the TRX40 Designare from the rest of the GIGABYTE TRX40 product stack is a GC-Titan Ridge Thunderbolt 3 AIC add-on card included in the accessories bundle.
The GIGABYTE TRX40 Designare is an XL-ATX sized motherboard and follows suit with the rest of its TRX40 product stack in memory specifications with support for DDR4-4400 and up to and including 256 GB of system memory. Like with most HEDT models with eight memory slots, they are arranged in two sets of four which sit either side of the large sTRX4 CPU socket. At the bottom of the board is four full-length PCIe 4.0 slots which operate at x16/x8/x16+x8, with a single PCIe 4.0 x1 slot in the centre. Located in between the full-length PCIe 4.0 slots are four PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots; two driven by the CPU and two coming from the TRX40 chipset. Also powered by the chipset is the eight SATA ports which feature support for RAID 0, 1, and 10 arrays.
GIGABYTE has been consistent with its power delivery implementation on its new models supporting the 7 nm Threadripper 3000 processors. Driving the 16-phase CPU power delivery is the Infineon XDPE132G5C PWM controller with sixteen Infineon TDA21472 70 power stages arranged into a 16+0 configuration. The power delivery heatsink is interconnected with other components via a heat pipe and stretches around the board in an L shaped design. The TRX40 chipset heatsink includes an active cooling fan, while for CPU and system cooling, there are eight 4-pin headers in total. One is designated for a CPU fan, one for a water pump, and six for chassis fans.
On the rear panel of the GIGABYTE TRX40 Designare is five USB 3.1 G2 Type-A, one USB 3.1 G2 Type-C, and two USB 2.0 ports. On the left-hand side is Clear CMOS and Q-Flash buttons, while on the other side is five 3.5 mm audio jacks and S/PDIF optical output powered by a Realtek ALC4050H and ALC1220 HD audio codec pairing. There is also a pair of networking ports powered by a pair of Intel Gigabit Ethernet controllers, while the Intel AX200 Wi-Fi 6 wireless interface adds BT 5.0 connectivity on top.
The GIGABYTE TRX40 Designare is aimed more at professionals and content creators with the Thunderbolt 3 AIC card included in the accessories. It drops 5 G or 10 GbE wired networking while sitting giving users dual Ethernet, and as expected, costs quite a bit less than the TRX40 Aorus Xtreme with an MSRP of $629.
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plonk420 - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
looks like the two ASRock and at least two, if not three of the three MSI use LOTES sockets. i expect FOXCONN to be the same trash that freaked me the f out trying to screw down the CPU cover on my X399 Designare EX (see HardOCP's Kyle having the same difficulty tightening his down, but mine seemed even worse).omasoud - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
Although ASRock TRX40 Creator is classified as ATX, the last PCI slot probably cannot take a double-width card (even though the manual on page 41 talks about installing 4 SLI double-width GPUs). ATX size specification says 7 PCI slots; but 4x2=8. Am I right?Llawehtdliub - Saturday, November 30, 2019 - link
Good review, thank you.solomonshv - Saturday, November 30, 2019 - link
do you guys think that the MSI TRX40 Pro would be a good candidate for a 3960X with some light overclocking? i've had multiple really bad experiences with gigafail, and if you check gigbayte x399 reviews on newegg, amazon and other places, other people did too. so gigabyte is a hard pass for me.dwade123 - Sunday, December 1, 2019 - link
Prices are going up and up with AMD, much more than anything Intel had ever priced. Zenith II is $850 and TR flagship model is expected to be at least $4000. AMD "wins again" but will AMD fans win yet?Qasar - Sunday, December 1, 2019 - link
dwade123, and look what intel did to the prices before they released zen. how much were you paying for QUAD core cpus, where the performance increase over the previous gen was 10% or less. intel cant complete with amd in multi thread performance, the ONLY way intel has any performance advantage over amd, is due to clock speed, thats all..imagine where intel cpu's would be if there was NO Zen....
scineram - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Yes.Korguz - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
dwade123 " Prices are going up and up with AMD, much more than anything Intel had ever priced " you sure about that ?? intels top end i9 chips were VERY expensive here, most of their i7 line was also expensive... but yet.. HOW was intel able to drop the prices like they HAD to do with the 10xxx series over the 9xxx series ??? people now complain that amd is priced to high, where were all of these people when intel was priced just as high, if not higher ??? it seems.. its ok for intel to do something.. but when amd does it.. all of a sudden its wrong and its a crime?? come on...intel cant compete with amd in almost everything now, the ONLY thing intel has left, is single thread performance, and even that, isnt by that much, and its ONLY cause of clock speed.. its about time amd was able to charge what they are for some of their chips, because the performance is there.. when intel catches up, intel will probably charge the same.. dwade123, you better be complaining about intels prices then as well....prophet001 - Monday, December 2, 2019 - link
Why the heck would you use the same physical socket keying.Korguz - Monday, December 2, 2019 - link
the socket is the same.. but the pins i think are different