I have been suffering for years with an unstable Asus PRIME TRX40-PRO S that finally met its end. The rest of the components have plenty of life left in them.
I’m hoping people can offer any wisdom, guidance, or anecdotal experiences with the handful of alternatives that are still available in the market.
I have an ASUS Zenith II and I’m mostly happy with it.
It’s got some werid bugs in that when the OS is shut-down and it should shut-off it just won’t.
And sometimes it has to re-train memory for some reason after a cold boot.
Also doesn’t like to be shut-down and then restarted, just won’t start again until you cut power fully, wait and start again.
Chipset also gets very hot when all PCIe (M.2) is fully populated + SATA and so on.
Other than those weird issues it’s fine and pretty often available on the 2nd hand market.
i had similar issues in my current system with the hanging on reboot and the methods described here fixed it Ubuntu 16.04 Hanging on reboot
note that it took a couple full reboot cycles to get it to take effect
I believe I had similar instability issues with the Asus PRIME with regard to the OS shutting down not actually working as one would expect. For the record that workstation was running Windows 10/11.
Thank you for the extra data point. I think I might be avoiding the Asus boards on the market.
For TRX40 alternatives, consider:
All are solid picks if you can still find them. Avoid used boards with bent pins or BIOS issues. Good luck!
I had some weird issues from newer BIOS releases with the TRX40 Creator - boost not working on my 3960X under Linux being one of them, but there were other irritations too. The boost issue was probably fixed in more recent Linux kernels but I switched to the Zenith II Extreme Alpha before that happened.
My NVME drives are all in a PCIe board so I can’t comment on the overheating from that, although the fan is partially obstructed by one of my GPUs. Not the best design choice IMHO but never noticed it overheating.
The Zenith II Extreme Alpha is a very solid board and haven’t had any issues - and it’s still getting BIOS updates which is always a bonus. Be aware that many 2nd hand Zenith II Extreme boards for sale are bare-bones and lack the ‘extras’ like the NVME DIMM-like module, fan extension board, etc and sourcing them separately if you want them can be difficult/expensive.
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