AMD’s third-generation Ryzen Threadripper processors form a new battle line in the struggle for the hearts and wallets of today’s most motivated PC enthusiasts and pro content creators. We just tested two of the three chips announced, the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X and Ryzen Threadripper 3960X, and these 24- and 32-core chips bring multicore performance to new heights, but on a new platform, using a similar-looking but decidedly different socket (sTRX4) and a new chipset. With this new chipset, the TRX40, as a backbone, this platform delivers a mind-boggling amount of raw multicore performance, memory and storage bandwidth, and connectivity potential. The TRX40 chipset enables access to up to 88 PCI Express 4.0 lanes, as well as support for a potential maximum of 20 SATA 3.0 ports and a dozen USB 3.2 Gen2 ports. (Got piles of SSDs and peripherals, anyone?)

Together, AMD’s primary board partners—Asrock, Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI—have developed a dozen new motherboards based on the TRX40 chipset, most of which are aimed squarely at the hardcore content-creation market (with a little PC gaming on the side). Let’s take a look at each. Common among them? They're all at least ATX size, many of them larger (definitely no compact-PC designs here), and all include eight DIMM slots for up to 256GB of DDR4 memory (using 32GB modules) with support for heavily overclocked memory modes.

And a warning: Hold on to your wallet! These boards are all exciting, but none of them is cheap. You’re looking at starting MSRPs of $399, and shooting straight up into space from there, peaking at more than $800.


Asrock TRX40 Taichi This Asrock TRX40 flagship board is also the company’s newest entry in its long-running, always-striking Taichi product line. Just like other Taichi motherboards, this $499 ATX board features prominent signature images and inlays of gears on the heatsinks and rear I/O shroud. This board also has one of the largest VRM heatsinks I’ve ever seen before on a motherboard. It runs almost the full width of the top of the board and extends upward for several inches with a heatpipe to further assist in cooling the 16 power phases. (Given the 280-watt TDP of these new Threadrippers, the power-delivery hardware needs to be robust.)



Taking advantage of the extra PCI Express lanes, Asrock configured this board with just two onboard M.2 Key-M PCI Express slots, less than the other TRX40 boards here, but the board also comes with a PCI Express x16 add-in carrier card (the "Hyper Quad M.2") that can host up to four more PCI Express NVMe SSDs. This motherboard also has superb networking support, with an Intel 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) controller, a 2.5Gbps Realtek Dragon NIC, and a 1Gbps Intel i211AT NIC. The three PCI Express x16 expansion slots support up to three-way SLI and CrossFireX for multicard mayhem.





Asrock TRX40 Creator Asrock’s stepped-down $449 TRX40 Creator dials down the bling from the TRX40 Taichi offering. The design looks like a more business-oriented board for sober use in a professional design environment—or, maybe, cooped up in a PC chassis that no one can see the inside of. This ATX board has less visual flair and is devoid of RGB LEDs, but it makes up for it by offering a fourth PCI Express x16 slot, potentially useful for those who need a brace of video cards to deliver a lot of GPGPU (that is, GPU compute) performance. (The board supports CrossFireX and SLI up to four cards.) There's also a vertical, active-cooling fan over the VRMs.



While the network-hardware loadout is no slouch on the Taichi board, the TRX40 Creator tops it, featuring a 10Gbps Aquantia NIC and a 2.5Gbps Realtek LAN chip, plus an Intel Wi-Fi 6 module. All TRX40 boards are largely maxed-out monsters, but the Creator seems to be the practical brother to Asrock’s wilder Taichi.





Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme “Zenith” is about right: The top of the Asus TRX40 product line, the $849.99 ROG Zenith II Extreme, is one monster of a motherboard in every sense: price, weight, power delivery, sheer presence. This Extended ATX (E-ATX) board itself is among the heaviest we’ve ever hefted, weighing 5.5 pounds and sandwiched front and back with heavy metal bracing acting as a rigid backing and wide-spanning heat dissipation. Also, like Asrock’s TRX40 Taichi, this board features a massive heatsink that runs across the top of the PCB, supplementing this board’s support for 16 power phases.



It’s clear that Asus is aiming to outgun Asrock and its other competitors in some areas, too, as this beastly board features four PCI Express x16 4.0 slots. While you can’t actually fit four dual-slot-width graphics cards on this board, you could, in theory, use a riser to plug in a fourth graphics card for extra GPGPU compute performance. You also get a whopping five M.2 slots: one on back, two on the board front, and two on Asus' own ROG DIMM.2 vertical-mount module, equipped with passive heatsinks. A few other TRX40 boards here offer more M.2 slots, but via a bundled PCI Express carrier card that takes up one of your x16 slots.



The connectivity is no joke, either, including 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6. The ROG TRX40 Zenith II Extreme also has a built-in 10Gbps Aquantia NIC, which gives it superior wired-internet throughput to the TRX40 Taichi. In addition, this board has a color OLED display on the top of the I/O panel that gives you feedback on the system’s boot process and helps with diagnosing boot issues, and reads out system-monitor info like temps and CPU frequency once you're booted. This, along with Gigabyte's Aorus Xtreme below, could be the ultimate board for the ultimate CPUs.





Asus ROG Strix TRX40 E Gaming It's funny to see a second ROG-branded gaming-oriented board from Asus for TRX40 here, as our initial impressions of third-gen Threadripper are that it is all kinds of overkill for PC gaming. Of course, plenty of content creators are also major PC gamers (or may be game developers), so here's a more, ahem, "budget friendly" option.



The $549.99 ROG Strix TRX40-E Gaming is essentially a cut-down version of the company’s Zenith II Extreme. It features a similar power-regulation system and VRM thermal solution, and just like the Zenith II it also features an OLED display, albeit a smaller one. (Though, surely, that can't account for the $300 markdown.)



This ATX board does drop some of the more premium features found on the Zenith flagship, including the 10Gbps Aquantia NIC. Instead, this board relies on a lesser 2.5Gbps Realtek TRL8125-GC NIC and a 1Gbps Intel i211-AT controller, plus 802.11ax/Wi-Fi 6 via the Intel AX200 chipset. The slot arrangement also goes down to three PCI Express x16 and one x4, with support for just two-card SLI or CrossFireX. You also get three M.2 slots, for drives up to 110mm long.





Asus Prime TRX40-Pro Tune down the RGB bling! Like with previous Prime-family boards we've seen and used, Asus designed the Prime TRX40-Pro for PC builders that prefer boards with a white-and-black color scheme. Other than the white heatsinks, this $449.99 ATX board also has more subdued features than Asus’ other TRX40 motherboards, but it's still a force to be reckoned with.



It doesn’t get the OLED display so prominently featured on the other boards, and it has just a single RJ-45 jack, with an Intel Gigabit i211-AT NIC backing it. Storage is solid, though, with three M.2 slots for drives up to Type-22110, and support for two- or four-card SLI or CrossFireX.





Gigabyte TRX40 Aorus Xtreme Gigabyte’s TRX40 flagship, ready to do battle with Asus' Zenith board, comes armored, head to toe, in black heat-dissipating metal. Almost everything on the front and back of this $849 board is covered by heatsinks or solid metal panels, except where ports, screws, and headers require some clearance. This oversize XL-ATX board almost comes off looking dull due to the dark-metal motif, but Gigabyte placed RGB LEDs on a few heatsinks and along the edge of the board to liven things up.



With four steel-reinforced PCI Express x16 slots, this board supports up to four graphics cards. The slots are spaced out enough that it may be possible, depending on the card, to install four dual-slot cards side by side without the need of a riser, which is not possible on Asus’ competing ROG Zenith II Extreme. The board supports quad, triple, and dual CrossFireX and SLI.



Storage is as extreme as Xtreme can be: four M.2 slots on the board, plus a bundled Aorus Gen4 AIC PCI Express adapter supplying four more M.2 slots if you choose to use it in one of your expansion slots. Gigabyte’s TRX40 Aorus Xtreme also has an exceptionally robust networking setup, with two--yes, two--Intel 10Gbps NICs and an Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 wireless adapter.





Gigabyte TRX40 Designare



The four PCI Express slots support two-, three-, and four-card CrossFireX and SLI, with the first two slots running at full x16 and the second two at x8. (The slots are spaced to all accept double-wide cards.) You also get an x1 slot, uncommon in this TRX40 lot. Four PCI Express M.2 slots are aboard, supplemented by the Aorus Gen 4 AIC adapter, which gives you four more M.2 slots via a PCI Express slot.



This board does retain the dual RJ-45 Ethernet-jack design, but both ports use an Intel gigabit i210-AT controller, and they are supplemented by Intel's AX200 Wi-Fi 6 module. Gigabyte also bundles its



The step down from Gigabyte’s TRX40 Aorus Xtreme is the company’s $629 TRX40 Designare. The Designare line, whatever the chipset and the platform, always signifies an elegant, understated board design that has a sophisticated aura and major chops for content creators. A significantly larger portion of this board’s oversize XL-ATX PCB is exposed than on the Aorus Extreme, but Gigabyte still outfitted it with adequately sized heatsinks over the M.2 slots, the chipset, and the power-regulation circuitry. A prominent silver heatpipe runs beside the board’s 16+3 power phases and down toward the lower-left-hand side of the board.The four PCI Express slots support two-, three-, and four-card CrossFireX and SLI, with the first two slots running at full x16 and the second two at x8. (The slots are spaced to all accept double-wide cards.) You also get an x1 slot, uncommon in this TRX40 lot. Four PCI Express M.2 slots are aboard, supplemented by the Aorus Gen 4 AIC adapter, which gives you four more M.2 slots via a PCI Express slot.This board does retain the dual RJ-45 Ethernet-jack design, but both ports use an Intel gigabit i210-AT controller, and they are supplemented by Intel's AX200 Wi-Fi 6 module. Gigabyte also bundles its GC-Titan Ridge add-in card , which features two Thunderbolt 3/USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C ports, along with two mini-DisplayPorts and a full-size DisplayPort. This lets you not only attach superfast external Thunderbolt 3 storage, but also daisy-chain display devices off the card, with the Titan Ridge board fed by an input from your discrete graphics card.

Gigabyte TRX40 Aorus Master The $499 Aorus Master comes off as a mixture of the feature sets of the TRX40 Aorus Extreme and Designare, but with a style of its own. This slightly smaller (but still big!) E-ATX board features a similar thermal solution to the one on the Designare, but a large metal baseplate like the TRX40 Aorus Xtreme’s. This board also features yet another networking combination. Instead of two 2.5Gbps ports like on the Designare, this board has one Aquantia 5Gbps NIC and one slower Intel gigabit controller, plus the Intel AX200 Wi-Fi 6 module.



As part of the trade-off for the lower price, the TRX40 Aorus Master does not come with the GC-Titan Ridge add-on card or an M.2-drive add-in card. The four PCI Express x16 slots support up to four cards in SLI or CrossFireX, and you get three M.2 slots onboard.





Gigabyte TRX40 Aorus Pro WiFi Gigabyte’s lowest-end TRX40 board (at $399, it has the lowest MSRP of any in this initial dozen) is still a high-end board by the standards of any other motherboard platform. In truth, all of Gigabyte’s TRX40 motherboards announced to date feature built-in wireless networking, so the ”WiFi” in this board’s name doesn’t really point out anything special.



This ATX board’s features are more reserved than what’s on Gigabyte’s other TRX40 boards, as it has a smaller heatpipe than the Aorus Master and Designare, and just a single gigabit RJ-45 jack. You get four PCI Express x16 slots, supporting SLI and CrossFireX up to four cards, and three M.2 slots.





MSI Creator TRX40 The $699 Creator TRX40 is the most subdued of the TRX40 flagship boards in the initial launch. It features fewer heatsinks and less cooling than the competition, and multicard SLI/CrossFireX support up to "only" three cards. MSI relies on a single Aquantia 10Gbps NIC alongside a slower gigabit Intel i211-AT Ethernet controller for network access, alongside Wi-Fi 6 wireless.



To spice things up, MSI includes a unique-looking RGB LED zone on the rear I/O shroud, and this big E-ATX board comes bundled with an add-on card that can support four M.2 NVMe SSDs in addition to the board's own three slots, letting you leverage all of those glorious PCI Express lanes made possible by third-gen Threadripper. Overall, however, for a flagship motherboard in the HEDT space, and at its $700 price, the MSI Creator TRX40 might lack a bit of wow factor to draw in the high-end enthusiast crowd. That’s not to say it’s not a well-rounded board, though. It should work equally well as the foundation for an extreme multi-video-card gaming computer or for a new ultra high-end workhorse. Or both.





MSI TRX40 Pro 10G Take the Creator TRX40, scrape off a few goodies, and what’s that give you? We suspect, something that looks a lot like the $499 MSI TRX40 Pro 10G. (Either that, or the MSI TRX40 Pro WiFi below.) This ATX board comes off looking blander than the Creator TRX40, as it’s stripped of RGB LEDs, which will be a positive to some shoppers. It also drops the 10Gbps Aquantia NIC, replaced here with a second Intel i211-AT controller.



Of course, the "10G" in the name has to mean something, so MSI bundles in a 10Gbps LAN card that helps to make up for the missing onboard Aquantia NIC. The board also comes with a two-slot M.2 add-on card (the "M.2 Xpander-Aero"), scaled down from the four-slot card that comes with the Creator TRX40, to supplement the two M.2 slots on the board. Using these add-ons will reduce how many GPUs you can have for compute-intensive workloads, however, which might make these extras less appealing than having fully integrated components, if you were planning to outfit your third-gen Threadripper rig with a cluster of video cards for GPU compute or multicard gaming. (The board supports up to three in SLI or CrossFireX.)





MSI TRX40 Pro WiFi Close in price ($469), the ATX-form-factor TRX40 Pro WiFi is essentially identical to MSI's TRX40 Pro 10G, except it features an Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 wireless card. In exchange for this wireless functionality, however, you don’t get the 10Gbps PCI Express network card that comes with the TRX40 Pro 10G.



In all other meaningful ways, the TRX40 Pro WFI and TRX40 Pro 10G are the same, which means that if you are picking between them, your decision should be down to which is more important to you: a fast Wi-Fi connection, or an ultrafast wired network connection. (The bundled M.2 card, dubbed "M.2 Xpander-Z," is slightly different than the Aero M.2 card that comes with the 10G board, but it also supports two devices.)





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