Asus ROG Strix TRX40-E Gaming Review

Overclocking

4.35GHz has been the usual maximum all-core overclock with our 24-core Ryzen Threadripper 3960X we've managed with other TRX40 boards and the ROG Strix TRX40-E Gaming achieved this easily with a vcore of 1.325V with no other tweaking required.

Performance Analysis 

There were no issues to report in the raw faster/slower performance data and also no stand-out results, which means that, ultimately, it's in the features, audio performance, cooling and EFI/software that you'll want to base your decisions on here. The single-threaded Cinebench result of 522 was a few points above the rest of the field, as was the multi-threaded score, but overall performance varied little across the boards we've tested so far.

Outside of those raw performance numbers in games and content creation, things didn't go entirely Asus' way, with the audio performance the lowest yet from a TRX40 board, but we should remember that this is by far the cheapest TRX40 board we've seen and we haven't tested MSI or Gigabyte's equivalents yet (watch this space). Still, a dynamic range of 105dBA isn't bad and is fairly typical for a Realtek ALC 1220 setup and isn't likely to worry anyone other than audiophiles. Meanwhile, power consumption was going well until we overclocked the board, where it recorded an eyebrow-raising 212W at idle. That's a good 40W more than the other boards on test. The ROG Zenith II Extreme didn't suffer from the same issue so we can only assume this was a glitch.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the ROG Strix TRX40-E Gaming proves that you don't need a £600 motherboard to own a 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper system as it handled all aspects of our testing well, with a couple of exceptions. Clearly, at this price on a mainstream motherboard, you'd expect it come with every bell and whistle imaginable, but that isn't the case here and neither was it for more affordable X399 boards, either. You get a decent array of features, of course, but most of the cash is laid down on the high-end desktop chipset. We'll be looking at other sub-£500 TRX40 alternatives, though, so we'd recommend waiting to see what the competition has, but you certainly won't be disappointed with the ROG Strix TRX40-E Gaming.