TRX40 Motherboard selection advice

Need help selecting TRX40 mobo for building a medium range workstation/non-hardcore gaming PC. Uses lots of VMs for work, disk intensive activities.

Plan is to through 3960 (or 3970) with 128GB 3600 CL16 Ram with potential upgrade to 256 later (buying another kit probably won’t work).

Gigabyte:
Aorus Xtreme

Likes:
2x10Gb Intel Lan
1 Slot PCIe 4.0 X 4 NVMe drives extender (correct me if am wrong this is NOT a RAID controller)

Dislikes:
Can’t tell when buying online if rev 1.0 vs 1.1
Gigabyte bad reputation of bios
Expensive

MSI:
Creator

Likes:
Cheapest amongst vendor flagships
Has NVMe extender
Fairly stable
Dislikes:
NVMe extender takes 2 slots (large fan)

Asus:
Zenith ii extreme alpha

Likes:
Latest release of them all
Asus bios reputation

Dislikes:
Lack of NVMe extender
2 x NVMe dimm runs off the chipset rather than direct CPU lanes

Feel free to correct anything I misstated above.

So why don’t you buy your own extender as those bundle with the boards is not high end and possibly couldn’t keep up with the r/w speed anyway.

This might sound crazy, but why not look at building an Epyc system? Seems like your use case would love all those pcie lanes.

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Why wouldn’t they keep up with r/W speeds?

If each NVMe is 4x PCIe 4.0 (say Samsung 980 Pro), then chucking 4 of these into an extender and into a 16x PCIE slot there will be no bottlenecks what so ever.

I initially wanted to do 5950x because it’s a good balance between gaming and workstation, then people on Reddit suggested TR 3000 because they overclock well and has decent gaming performance.

Epyc is out of the picture both money and gaming wise.

Hi,

got the MSI trx40 pro wifi and the only thing i can complain about is the lack of selecting the main gpu. IMMO groups are fine and overall pretty good for the price.
There was an article about 8 channel RAM on TR3960x and can’t remember excactly, but the sweetspot for 8 dimms (256GB) was 32GB 3200cl16 if iam not wrong, just try to google it.

For the VM’s:

  1. do they need GPU’s aka Passthrough?
  2. how many will run concurrently?
  3. Performance vs easy to use vs stability?
  4. Guest os?

For the Host:

  1. KVM/Esxi? or something like the VMWare Workstation Pro?
  2. PCIe cards? 10gbe, nvme-expander, etc.

Just a hint, if you need fast drives in every vm, than go the lvm route and passthroug every vm a volume.

Btw: AM4 only supports dual-channel, so 256GB is not possible and you only have 20 (+4 Chipset) PCIe gen4 lanes on x570 boards.

  1. GPU: they don’t need GPU pass through, it would still be nice to have as the UI responsivenis is currently shit
  2. How many will run concurrently: probably total of 4 Max, 1 x 64 GB VM, 1 x 32 GB VM
  3. stability -> performance -> easy of use
  4. Gues OS: Windows

Host:

  1. VMWare Workstation Pro or Virtual Box
  2. NVMe, lots of NVMes, this will host gigabytes over gigabytes of large VMs and games

For ~450€ the msi trx40 pro is pretty good and you get a nvme expander perfect for the last x8 Slot.
There is no “bad” trx40 mainboard… if you don’t overclock, the only difference is the bios and how they use the chipset lanes. (and some rgb bling bling)

Need more than 4 nvme drives -> fine buy a expander for 80€
Need Wifi/BT -> take the wifi edition
Need 10gbe -> take the 10gbe edition
Wanna include watercooling? -> check on both editions
Need bifurcation -> check
Need space (dark rock pro) -> check
Need 4 x16 slots? -> check (x16x8x16x8)
Need a x1 slot for IPMI? -> check
Quiet chipset fan -> check
Need boot gpu selection -> nope, maybe a bios update in the future

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Yup agree.

Only the Asrock TRX40 Creator board is the weakest of the lot in regards to the vrm implementation.
But that board is still totally fine for the 3960X and 3970X cpu’s really.
And for the people who have the money and need the performance of the massive 3990X,
will generally not look at the entry level trx40 boards anyways.
So that is totally fine.

The Msi TRX40 pro 10G is indeed a pretty interesting board.
I think it offers a pretty decent feature pack for the money.
The only downside is indeed the boot gpu selection.
But other then that, from a feature / doller perspective Msi is offering a pretty nice package there.

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One other “general” con of MSI, but not the board

Yeah that’s a thing.

But yeah in the end, the main thing that matters is that people just buy,
a good product for the money.
For the people who don’t like Msi, there is plenty of other choice really.
In the end every company has their pro’s and con’s.
To me the most important thing is the component quality used on a said board,
the vrm components and how stable and good a bios is.
And from a vrm perspective, every company has great and crap boards.
But in regards to trx40, there aren’t really any bad ones.
It’s just that the Asrock Creator has the weakest vrm of the lot.

For people who are interested in vrm spec information,
which components used on several trx40 boards.
i made a topic about that a while ago.

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he speaks about Gigabyte struggeling with high speed memory, not sure if this can be fixed with BIOS update?

Thanks for sharing, it was a little unclear if it worked on the Gigabyte Designare?

Currently have 4x 32gb Ripjaws 3200 running at 3200 looking to see if I will be able to go beyond this

Because they uses 1 controller, I suspect that they cannot keep up with 4 4.0 nvme ssds. Also, the extender is MSI board only drawback so I would buy an extender and eliminate that drawback

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