GIGABYTE TRX40 Designaire & Thunderbolt Tested | Level One Techs

Did you know the Designare TRX40 comes with the Titan Ridge Thunderbolt add-in card? And that it can work just fine on Threadripper?! But getting the drivers just right for reliable operation requires precise setup.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://level1techs.com/video/gigabyte-trx40-designaire-thunderbolt-tested
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My biggest thing is if it works with Clover + Catalina. That’s what most people want to use it for, a Threadripper Hackintosh Pro.

It’s a nice looking board but dissapointing that it doesn´t feature 10Gb nic really.
I mean dual 1Gb intel nic’s is nice but generally not really that usefull for many people,
only on a few very specific use case scenario’s.
It’s nice that if features a Titanridge addin card.
But yeah i mean it’s a €760,- board.

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I’m disappointed that Gigabyte advertised this for the previous generation x399 Designare, and then abandoned their customers. Never buying another Gigabyte product after that.

In what way were customers abandoned? I still have a 1st gen designare with working thunderbolt on alpine ridge. I am a bit worried that intel is “gimping” thunderbolt in the dch drivers vs legacy drivers… but that’s in no way gigabyte’s fault.

I’m not fully sure what you are trying to say.
So feel free to explain.
But that X399 is a EOL platform is not Gigabyte’s fault,
but just AMD’s fault basically.

This is indeed an interesting item.
I’m kinda curious if this is either something that intel wants,
or that it actually is something that Microsoft demands?

If there is indeed still a spat going on, we may never see USB4 ever come to fruition. Only USB 3.3, 3.4, 3.99… etc.

So I can buy a GC-TitanRidge card, plug it into my x399 Designare and have it work out of the box under Windows?

Alpine ridge yes.if you don’t use the dch drivers and plug it onto the header.

If you got the dch drivers it doesn’t work but that’s true of Intel systems also

It should work on Titan ridge also but haven’t tested

What’s your favorite TRX40 board so far?

I’m a little perplexed with some of the boards having so many add-in cards. It really limits your possibilities with having multiple GPUs. That’s why I personally went with the Zenith II Extreme since I can have 5 NVME disks and 10 gigabit Ethernet without sacrificing any PCI slots.

In that regard, I’m especially baffled by the MSI Creator TRX40. It has a dual slot 4 NVME add-in card. There’s only two places on that board for a dual slot GPU.

Good to know, I’ll start watching for a good deal on one.

Yes basically like wendell said. :slight_smile:

Well, one thing’s for sure, Catalina doesn’t have the DCH problem, but has other problems related to making stuff work on Non-Apple hardware.

Also, are the 2 Intel Gigabit controllers identical or different? Ideally would want them to be different for VFIO.

I tried to hackintosh today but it doesn’t seem to be a thing yet … I am getting an allocation error. I tried slide=1 to slide=35 looking for available pages in the memory map but it doesn’t boot.

3950x is fine ofc just not 3960x/3970x

So if anyone wants to help with that I’ll try whatever

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I’m planning to build a workstation using this board, primarily because it’s the only TR3 board with TB3. Is the BIOS accessible via a USB-C connection from the TB3 adapter to a display?

Yes, but you have to connect the video card to the TB adapter via the mini dp to dp cables in the box?

Cool, and then it should just work without needing any BIOS tweaks or OS-level drivers? I’m planning to run headless for now, but only have LG’s UltraFine 4k with USB-C input for initial setup.

I’ve got a new system build up and running with this motherboard, and can confirm that the LG UltraFine 4K USB-C display works well. Also running Micron’s 3200MHz ECC RAM, MTA18ADF2G72AZ-3G2E1, although it’s not on the QVL.

Some minor annoyances, the tiny VRM fan is annoyingly loud by default, but not bad after turned down in the BIOS. Also sometimes the power buttons, both case and on board, stop functioning after shutting down until the PSU is switched off and then back on.

I have a Gigabyte TRX40 Aorus Master, it has the TBH_C header on it. Picked up the gigabyte titan ridge card and installed it last night. I am running Siduction (Debian Sid) with Kernel 5.4 it appears as if the card is working correctly, I just need to pick up a thunderbolt compatible device to test with.

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