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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Bccc1 - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
My case fans are Noctua NF-S12A running at max 500rpm. CPU and GPU are watercooled with an external pump and radiator sitting a few meters away with acoustic isolation. So I'm pretty sure I would hear the chipset fans.I was expecting to shell out ~$1000 for a completly passive Gigabyte board, or even more if it had a PEX chip to use even more PCIe cards, and am very dissapointed that that doesn't exist. Any suggestions for a DIY mod?
eek2121 - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
You are nuts if you think a tiny little low RPM chipset fan is bad. Chipset fans are inevitable (though a die shrink may temporarily make this go away until PCIE5), and the fact is, the fan on your PSU, GPU, or case fans, even at low levels, will drown out any noise from a chipset fan. Even if the PSU fan is off and you have water cooling, the case fans, at even 400 rpm, make more noise than the chipset fan. Note that it's not currently possible to have every fan in a system shut off on high end platforms, except the chipset fan itself might shut off. Even with an AIO, there must be some airflow for the radiator.Sivar - Monday, December 2, 2019 - link
It's really more a matter of long-term reliability based on my past experience.If a 120mm CPU fan starts to die, get loud, burns out due to dust, or otherwise becomes damaged, it isn't an issue to replace it even 5 years from now. With a proprietary motherboard CPU/heatsink, we are at the mercy of the vendor's long-term support.
realbabilu - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
Any motherboard s TRX with ipmi? I mean it would be a workstation or a server, a nice ipmi remote will be nice.msroadkill612 - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
"the TRX40 chipset, and offers 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes to the system. That being said, eight of those are used for the CPU-to-chipset connection, leaving 16 for ports and other devices. This is on top of the 64 PCIe 4.0 lanes for the CPU: 64 + 24 = 88 PCIe 4.0 lanes total, but the x8 link in each direction between CPU and chipset gives a usable 72 PCIe 4.0 lanes for the platform."WHAT???
howsabout?:
The chipset uses 8 of the 64 lanes to create (multiplex?) 24x lanes - 8 of which are used for chipset usb & sata ports, leaving 16 lanes for various configurations of additional IO, at the discretion of the mobo maker.
sailorchou - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
As I know, some boards have the type-c USB Gen3.2 x2 (20Gbps aggregation). Totally ignored?HJay - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
The last thing an audio creator wants is some McGyvered / red-necked USB bridge hack-job of a motherboard. In this regard, the S1220 codec models are the only ones having my attention -the ASUS TRX40-Pro in particular since any Real content creator is going to stick their nose up at Wi-Fi. Does it have a secondary codec though? Thank you very much for the timely post which will, hopefully, prompt much discussion regarding the audio peculiarities.HJay - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
I suppose audio creators will want to pay close attention to which socket is better suited to their work: AM4 or TR.Bccc1 - Friday, November 29, 2019 - link
Can you explain further? Why would an audio creator pay attention to the onboard audio if he will use his own audio interface? Even if it's only a cheap Focusrite Scarlett, why does the S1220 matter?Llawehtdliub - Saturday, November 30, 2019 - link
Because he's young and ignorant but highly opinionated.