Hear The Aorus TRX40 Master Roar

Gigabyte’s T-Rex Won’t Devour Your Wallet

Motherboards for the new Threadripper do not come cheap, so at $480 the Gigabyte Aorus Master sits in the middle of the pack when it comes to TRX40 boards.  That doesn’t mean that Gigabyte skimped on the features, this board will give you 16 real power phases, eight DIMMs that can support up to DDR4-4400, two PCIe 4.0 16x, two 8x and a single 1x, three M.2 drives, eight SATA ports, Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax, Bluetooth 5.0 and both an Aquantia 5GbE and an Intel GbE NIC.

The Guru of 3D did mention the chipset fans on this board, as they have come back with PCIe 4.0’s impressive thermal output.  There are two, one for the PCH Chipset which operates silently and one for the PWM located in that large I/O panel which was anything but, until they spotted settings in the BIOS which allowed them to set it to silent operation at which point they never heard it again.  As the thermals on the board were more than reasonable, don’t worry about setting the fans to run quietly.

Performance was great, albeit with one large caveat.  When testing Threadrippers with more than 32 cores they encountered memory issues which took some time to get past and were never quite resolved.  When they limited themselves to a mere 32 cores the problems completely disappeared and the board was rock solid.  In theory a future BIOS update may resolve that problem, so keep an eye out for updates.