Gigabyte TRX40 Aorus Xtreme Review

Conclusion

There are two clear sides to today’s reviews; the CPU and the TRX40 motherboards.

Getting the CPU out of the way it is, as we said in our main review of the 3rd Generation Threadripper 3960X, an absolute monster. It is capable of pushing incredibly high scores in pretty much every benchmark, even those that you would imagine wouldn’t really take advantage of 24 cores. If you give the TR 3960X a test that best expresses its abilities such as rendering or video encoding then it crunches numbers in the same way the Cookie Monster crunches baked treats.

The Gigabyte TRX40 Aorus Xtreme is a complete star. We’re not giving away any secrets to say that Gigabyte had a dark period where their motherboards just didn’t live up to the promise of their earlier efforts, nor what you would expect from such a massive company. Their X470 motherboards redressed the balance and their X570 Aorus offerings challenged anything you could bring to the party. Therefore it isn’t a surprise per se that the TRX40 Aorus Xtreme is so brilliant, but if it is a surprise it’s a pleasant one. Gigabyte deserve many plaudits for realising where they were going wrong, addressing those issues, and going above and beyond when it comes to fixing them. In fact we’d go so far as to say they have usurped the ASUS ROG range when it comes to both features and ability.

The design works on both a pure hardware level as well as an aesthetic one. It looks gorgeous with the Xtreme board perfectly encapsulating the blend of features for the enthusiast as well as the aesthete. The Aorus logo and armor sit alongside the many RGB headers to give you a motherboard that absolutely looks the part when you’ve got all your hardware installed. Look a little closer and you spot the braced slots for both DDR4 and PCI Express 4.0, braced power inputs for 12V CPU power, horizontal ATX 24pin and all those things that make building your system and living with the Aorus Xtreme a pleasure. It’s back to the old days of the Gigabyte UD9 days when they just nailed everything on the hardware side of things. The included software lags a little behind the competition, but it’s a very easy thing to fix and update, and most enthusiasts at the level targeted by the TRX40 and Threadripper combo probably don’t run all the apps and utilities you get on the CD anyway. We’d rather have great hardware and average software than the other way around.

Speaking of software, and leading into our performance thoughts, we also need to credit Gigabyte for producing such a good BIOS out of the box. With any new product there are going to be some teething issues, particularly pre-launch, and yet the Aorus Xtreme worked flawlessly. They weren’t privy to the last minute AMD BIOS updates and so the Xtreme will only get better as it matures. Given how good it already is that’s a spectacular victory for Gigabyte’s BIOS design team. There is very little to choose between the three TRX40 motherboards we have on hand for launch, with the design of modern motherboard chipsets having so much locked into the unchangeable aspects that most high end options will have similar abilities. It’s a long time since the days when everything from USB ports to SATA controllers were down to the individual manufacturer.

With a superb level of attention to detail married to a robust build quality and excellent performance the Gigabyte TRX40 Aorus Xtreme continues the renaissance that Gigabyte have undergone in recent months and should be the top of your shortlist of potential TRX40 motherboards.

   

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