Gigabyte TRX40 Aorus Xtreme Review
Up Close
With such a premium price point and design the TRX40 Aorus Xtreme box is everything you would imagine. The blissful combination of simple black with a chromatic reflective logo and product name. The definition of our belief that the higher up the range you go the more minimalist the packaging design becomes. If you’re buying the Aorus Xtreme you do so because of the features, not a box replete with feature boxes.
As you would expect from such a premium motherboard the Aorus Xtreme has every single accessory you could possibly imagine and many that you look at and wonder what it’s for. There are oodles of cables, clips, ties and things. If the merit of a motherboard can be judged in how much you get in the box before you see the PCB, then the Aorus Xtreme runs off into the hills with the gold medal.
Beneath the manual is the Aorus Gen4 AIC adaptor which has a 5mm pure copper heatsink, double ball bearing fan and thermals pads to keep the four M.2 drives it can take running at their best efficiency. There is even a one click RAID option if the regular 5 GB/s speed of PCI Express 4.0 drives doesn’t quite sate your bandwidth desires.
Belowe the shiny shroud are four M.2 sockets with large copper heatsinks helping disperse any heat generated so that the blower fan can do it’s thing and keep your fast drives working at their premium throughput levels. It is a nice step up from a plain PCB that requires some awkward case fan placement to give the best airflow.
We won’t show you all the cables but the ones here should at least give you an indication of how much attention to detail has been put into the accessories as well as the PCB. Right angled connections, thick tightly-grouped braiding. Very nice indeed.
As we saw earlier the antenna provided with the Aorus Xtreme come with a magnetic base and two angles to give you the full WiFi potential without any signal drop out. They are a long way from the plan “screw it in” pencil thin ones that normally come with motherboards.
