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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
109 Comments
View All Comments
PopinFRESH007 - Sunday, December 29, 2019 - link
PCIe is a serial point to point topology so each link or "lane" is independent (ignoring things like PCIe switches). This is different to the legacy PCI bus which is a shared parallel bus which would behave as you've described.Dionysos1234 - Thursday, November 28, 2019 - link
Any information on what memory is supported? ECC?Llawehtdliub - Saturday, November 30, 2019 - link
Yes ECC is supportedVatharian - Thursday, November 28, 2019 - link
Has anyone from ASUS actually thought even for a second about the PCI-Express slots placement? Using dual GPUs, until converted truly to single slot with water cooling, blocks most of the slots. In my case I'd need 4 or 5 slots, which leaves ROG Zenith II Extreme from their linup. And ASRock Creator. As much as I hate Gigabyte I must admit their Aorus line has sensible layouts, and MSI's are mixed bag.nevcairiel - Thursday, November 28, 2019 - link
These boards are clearly not designed for Dual GPU purposes, but instead actually offer quite some space for the primary GPU (3 slots is mandatory for many high-end air cooled cards these days), and additional slots for other 1 slot cards.eek2121 - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
Nearly every board I looked at in the article has spacing for multiple GPUs.eek2121 - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
I noticed you said 3 slots. I have a high end GPU, it takes 2 slots. The 3rd slot is extremely far away from the 2nd slot and could comfortably fit a GPU. Factor in the width of an m.2 drive when looking at the pictures above and you'll realize you are mistaken (many of the boards have m.2 slots in between, That is all the space you need for air cooling a GPU, since most high end hardware only takes up 2 slots, the 3rd 'slot' is actually where an M.2 drive would sit, and the real third slot is below it, leaving plenty of space for cooling fan air circulation).Spunjji - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
Serious question - are dual-GPUs even used these days?I know they're out for gaming, but I don't know the state of play regarding GPU compute.
Bccc1 - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
For GPU rendering (e.g. Redshift, Octane and VRay Next) dual GPUs are quite common and even quad GPUs can be used quite efficiently.eek2121 - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
I don't kow about the "blocking most of the slots" terminology. On my X399 board, only 1 slot is blocked (and technically you still could put a card in that slot, I actually had a low profile x4 card next to my GPU without any heat issues). On many X570 boards, spacing is such that no slots are blocked. In both cases, there are single slot GPUs, just not high end ones. As you've stated, using a custom loop allows for even high end GPUs to use only 1 slot.