MSI Creator TRX40 Review

Overclocking

With our Threadripper 3960X under the hood, we were aiming for the usual 4.35GHz we've achieved so far using a vcore of 1.325V, which seems to be the limits of what less exotic forms of cooling can cope with. We're happy to report that the Creator TRX40 hit the same 4.35GHz all-core overclock, which is around 250MHz higher than the stock speed all-core boost and a good 150-200MHz higher than what PBO would achieve given our limited testing so far. However, you'll be losing 150MHz compared to the single-core boost of 4.5GHz, so a lot will depend on whether you need maximum multi-threaded performance or want to maintain that single-core boost. In any event, the Creator TRX40 was happy to play along and with a minimum of fuss.

Performance Analysis 

Picking apart the performance numbers is tricky for the simple reason there's not much between this and the only other TRX40 board we've tested so far, which is the Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme. The former had slightly better single-threaded performance in Cinebench, while the opposite was true in the multi-threaded test, albeit by even smaller amounts. Blender saw the MSI board notch a second off the Asus board's time, but both were equal once overclocked. There wasn't much in it in games, either, with Far Cry 5 showing modest gains for each board when overclocked with marginally faster speeds for the Asus board, with next to nothing between them in Time Spy, too.

RightMark Audio Analyzer saw both boards hit some of the best numbers we've seen, so audiophiles won't find much to pick one board over the other and we don't expect other boards to better these figures. There were some differences in the M.2 and power consumption figures, though, with the former seeing the MSI board add nearly 150MB/sec to the read speed with our Corsair MP600 SSD. This could just be down to a very early BIOS on the Asus board, but in the overall scheme of things, this is a tiny amount given the near 5,000MB/sec throughput. The only area of concern was the overclocked power consumption. The Asus board drew 526W here, while the MSI board hit 622W. We double-checked this figure and got the same result so we can only assume this is down to the EFI or a stray setting somewhere. It's less than 100W when dealing with an overclocked 24-core CPU, but it still raised eyebrows.

Conclusion

Combined with an excellent EFI, solid cooling and a decent if not spectacular feature-set, the Creator TRX40 is a beast and would certainly not disappoint any high-end air or water-cooled system owner. However, for the price we'd have liked to see a little more excitement, more exotic features and flexibility. The Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme, for example, costs about the same, but has its DIMM.2 card, funky OLED display, fantastic RGB lighting, more SATA ports and generally looks the part, while the Creator TRX40 looks perhaps a bit dated and maybe not quite worth its price tag - something many of you commenting in our review of its X570 sister board mentioned, too. Still, if you're otherwise sold on its design or features then it still represents a powerful home for a 3rd Gen Threadripper CPU.