Gigabyte TRX40 Aorus Xtreme Review

Overclocking

With such a monstrous motherboard, you'd expect no shortcomings when it comes to overclocking. However, we did hit a little snag in that our test voltage of 1.325V would only net us 4.3GHz with our Threadripper 3960X, and not the 4.35GHz we've seen with other boards. Even adding in extreme loadline calibration didn't allow us to get any further with this voltage. It's not a disaster as using a higher vcore will likely solve the issue, plus it's likely most will opt for stock speed or PBO-derived overclocking anyway. Still, being a flagship board, you do expect the absolute best.

Performance Analysis 

As far as the performance benchmarks go, there weren't many sticking points other than a rather slow Cinebench multi-threaded score of 13,011 compared to at least 13,700 for the other two TRX40 boards we've tested so far. However, Blender didn't reflect this and the single-threaded score was on par, once again touting the awesome single-threaded performance of AMD's new Threadrippers. 

There's barely any difference between the boards we've tested so far in Far Cry 5 and Time Spy, but admittedly, there was a slight lead for the Gigabyte board here. Once overclocked, Cinebench's multi-threaded score rose to 14,500, which was again a little slower than competition thanks to a slightly lower overclock, and the single-threaded score fell to 500, thanks to the 4.5GHz single-core boost no longer working due to the manual overclock. Audio performance was excellent, although both MSI and Asus' flagships were a little better here. The M.2 test came up a little slow, too, hitting 4,789MB/sec read speed, which is nearly 200MB/sec short of what we achieved with the Asus board. Thankfully, despite a PCB chock-full of features, the idle and load temperatures at stock speed were on the money, drawing only 4W more under load than the other two boards and just 6W more when overclocked than the Asus ROG Zenith II Xtreme.

Conclusion

There will always be super-premium motherboards that cost twice as much as the rest of the field, but while the vast majority of us will never be able to afford one, it's always great to see manufacturers going all-out to create something awesome and slightly ridiculous. The TRX40 Aorus Xtreme is over-engineered in a lot of ways plus it looks fantastic and sports dozens of cutting-edge features such as dual 10-Gigabit LAN, eight M.2 ports, with four of those coming by way of a high-quality expansion card. We have to admit that it maybe doesn't feel like it's worth nearly £150 more than the Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme - the latter looks equally good and sports most of the same features, too. However, if you need the best of practically everything, including insane amounts of storage and cutting-edge networking, and have a suitably enormous wallet, then it doesn't get much more extreme than this.