MSI TRX40 Creator Preview

Introduction

The popularity of the AMD Zen architecture has been built on the success of their wholesale design changes. After some wilderness years AMD absolutely exploded back on to the market with high core counts coupled to high clock speeds and yet retaining their attractive pricing.

One of the success stories was their Threadripper CPUs. They took the idea Intel have had for a long time with their Xeon processors – high core counts for creative types – and improved upon it by making them more user-friendly to the gamer and home user. The 2nd generation smoothed over what few rough edges the originals had and was so capable in calculation heavy tasks that it has become the defacto standard for anyone seeking massive core performance without making their bank manager weep.

We’ve already seen the refinements and enhancements that the 3rd Generation of Ryzen CPUs have brought, with better thermals, better power efficiency and higher clock speeds, so it is with bated breath that we await the 3rd Generation of Threadripper CPUs to see how they have implemented these refinements. In the meantime we can at least look at the new TRX40 chipset based motherboards and get a feel for what will underpin the high core honeys, and it’s the turn of MSI and their Creator motherboard to cast our eye over.

Unlike Gigabyte and ASUS the Creator isn’t a variant of an extant motherboard, but rather a new name with some clever design touches. Let’s get a quick overview of the specs and we’ll get down to how it looks in the flesh.

Technical Specifications

Like many of the TRX40 motherboards we’ve previewed so far the Creator is in the larger E-ATX format, a perfect reason to upgrade your case to a larger model. The Creator has a full suite of high bandwidth options from USB 3.2 Gen2 through 7 M.2 slots and 10G LAN sitting alongside the Intel Gigabit option and Wi-Fi 6 AX200 wireless. All those CPU cores require a lot of power too and with a 70A power design there shouldn’t be any lack of ampage to keep your 3rd Gen Threadripper CPU fed. We’ll look at that in more detail in a moment.

  

There is plenty of need for cooling on all high end systems and with so many cores available with the 3rd Generation Threadripper CPUs it’s no surprise that the Creator comes with many fan headers, monitoring points and all the elements you require to keep your system frosty under hefty loadings.