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
gavbon - Thursday, November 28, 2019 - link
We tested the 3970X and 3960X in our review (https://www.anandtech.com/show/15044/the-amd-ryzen...In the power testing, our chips hit 280w without issues, especially the 32-core. Which the definition of TDP is up for question, the CPUs seem bang on the power figures we saw
Hul8 - Thursday, November 28, 2019 - link
At least one reviewer got ~285 - 295 W power consumption testing Threadripper 3rd at stock, until they realized they had memory overclocked to 3600 MT/s.With the RAM also at stock (3200 MT/s), the power consumption ended up between 279 - 280 W, so just within the given TDP.
tamalero - Saturday, November 30, 2019 - link
Also, doesn't some motherboards (Particularly ASUS and Gigabyte) do minimal overclock by default on the "recommended settings" ?eek2121 - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
TDP != power consumed. TDP is thermal design power. The type of cooler itself can change the TDP formula in some cases (due to being part of the formula), and AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel all have different ways of calculating TDP.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, November 28, 2019 - link
Thanks Gavin, interesting article. Question: Your initial mentioning of the chipset says it's made on GloFo's 12 nm node, but it's 14 nm a bit later in the article. Can you clarify? Thanks!jeremyshaw - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
Since the last page has a picture of the chipset saying Made in Taiwan, it's probably either TSMC or UMC... unless if packaging somehow counts as "made in."msroadkill612 - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
Good spotting & there may be more to t than u think.Dunno, but others may?
I recall reading that the exciting new IO chip on Zen 2, & the TR chipset, are ~"cut an pastes" of each other - one is made by tsmc & the other by glofo.
This may be the source of the confusion?
Bccc1 - Thursday, November 28, 2019 - link
Thanks for this writeup. I'm currently drawn to Gigabytes TRX40 Designare and TRX40 Aorus Xtreme. Does the "40GB/s GC-Titan Ridge add-in card" work on any board?Any info on bifurcation support? Gigabyte is quite clear about that and offers x4x4x4x4 for the x16 slots and x4x4 for the x8 slots. Sadly no 8x4x4 or x8x8. MSIs manual explains the BIOS option "PCIe SlotX Lanes Configuration" with the sentence "PCIe lanes configuration for MSI M.2 XPANDER series cards/ Other M.2 PCIe
storage card." which sounds like x4x4x4x4 bifurcation to me, but is quite vague.
Is x8x8 and x8x4x4 supported on any board?
msroadkill612 - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
Bifurcation obfuscation?eek2121 - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
I can't speak to the current MSI offerings, but my x399 Gaming Carbon (off the top of my head, I don't use this feature, however) supports x4x4x4x4 and x8x8. Other modes may be possible, but I haven't looked.