ASRock Rack TRX40D8-2N2T Threadripper ATX motherboard

Hi everyone! Long time lurker but a new poster here.

ASRock Rack has just put online this board: TRX40D8-2N2T

It’s an interesting server board with a BMC and dual 10Gb but also interesting for a workstation build. The ATX form factor makes more compact builds possible in contrast to all the E-ATX consumer boards from MSI and Gigabyte.

No active cooling for the VRM. I wonder how that will work out!

I think I’m wondering more about how the BIOS is going to work out… :wink:

But I doubt you can open up the all-core limits of a 3990X with liquid cooling and expect the TRX40D8-2N2T to be happy about it, Would be fun to look for its limits tough :slight_smile:

Interesting. Any rumours on availability or pricing?

This is interesting. Once the glut of TRX40 boards were released with the 3960 and 3970, the market was kind of quiet. Other than the Alpha, not too many have been released since Nov. So now with this board coming out, we know that TRX40 is going to continue thru the 4th gen TR. Question for me is, what is coming on the consumer side of things for TRX40?

It is a shame it has 3x x16 + 1x x8 slots without the option of additional slots between the lower two x16’s to allow two pairs of 16/0 or 8/8.

The option to have 1 x16 and 5x x8 cards would allow for flexibility, such as a card full of USB4/TB4 ports, that is unlikely to need more than x8 PCIe gen4.

It really does seem to be that there is an unwritten rule for TRX40 of only 4 CPU lane slots of gen4 allowed.

Due to the socket orientation it’s gonna be difficult to blow the CPU cooler to the rear with this board.

Glad to see this has appeared, although it’s a less interesting platform as things stand than it’s predecessor the X399-D8A-2t - with no backwards compatibility with cheaper old threadrippers, and the high prices of the current gen processors, it’s basically competing against a lot of Epyc options that probably make more sense if you are building a server (especially once you start coming up against RAM capacity limits with unbuffered ECC modules - 256gb is a lot, but nothing compared to what you could get in an Epyc server should you want to.)

To some extent the Threadripper has been cannibalised by the Ryzen anyway, because so few people actually need more than 16 (or for that matter 12…) cores.

I suppose the speed of the Threadripper cores might help on the software licensing front if you are running it as a server - 24x3.8ghz cores will run faster than 32x 2ghz epyc cores and be cheaper to buy software license for.

Conversely though it’s a lot of money to sink on a platform if any stability issues do emerge with the threadripper platform on your workloads.

Well, the orientation is perfect if you want to use an Epyc type cooler and put it in a rack server:
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/dynatron-a26-active-cooler-amd-tr4-epyc-processor-socket-sp3-side-blower-60mm-pwm-fan-for-2u-server

Of course, good luck getting one of those that is specced for 280w processors, which so far as I can tell all the current threadrippers are.

For workstation use you are probably better getting a water cooling system anyway, in which case the orientation doesn’t matter.

Yeah I’m thinking for a workstation application but I’m generally uncomfortable with water cooling anyway.

I didn’t know about those Epyc side-blower air coolers, thanks. Actually the one you linked to is rated for 280W according to Dynatron’s own site. But I personally don’t see the point in blowing through the long side as it must be more inefficient than the other way.

Guess I’ll have to run a top exhaust if I go with this board.

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I have one of these boards coming either Tomorrow or Saturday. I’ll post pictures if anyone is interested.

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Congrats! Yeah that would be great. What kind of build are you planning for with this mobo? What kind of CPU cooler are you going for? I’m also curious about support for DDR4-3200 ECC as the QVL does not mention any ECC DIMMs higher than 2666.

I’m using it as a replacement for a Gigabyte TRX40 Designare that’s currently in the system.
The system runs esxi 6.7 currently (may upgrade to 7 soon)
Treadripper 3970x
128GB DDR4 3000 Corsair Vengeance (4x32gb)
Chenbro RM41300-FS81 4u case gutted to fit a custom loop.
I have a quadro rtx 5000 I pass through for gaming and CUDA processing, also in the custom loop.

Generally speaking, I’m spending my days spinning up and down large numbers of vms, and needed something faster and cheaper than waiting on AWS or Azure.

The only thing I haven’t done yet is figure out how to pass through the usb ports on the board yet. I’ll be putting some effort into that this weekend.

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