Gigabyte TRX40 Aorus Master Review

Overclocking

Our Threadripper 3960X is usually good for 4.35GHz using 1.325V and that's been the case with most boards we've tested so far. However, the TRX40 Aorus Master could only hit 4.3GHz at this voltage even with loadline calibration enabled. That's a slight blemish in an otherwise solid benchmarking session, but if you plan on running at stock speed, it's clearly not an issue.

Performance Analysis 

There's not much difference between boards in most of our benchmarks, and that's generally a good thing as it means there are no gremlins or teething issues at work. It was one of the faster boards in single-threaded performance, peaking at 520 points in Cinebench - a couple higher than its more expensive sibling and second only to the Asus board, which managed 522. It sat in the middle of the pack in the multi-threaded test and matched the rest of the field in Blender, too.

Far Cry 5 and Time Spy see even less variation with such similar CPU frequencies and even applying the overclock only had a marginal impact on performance, which was otherwise unremarkable compared to the rest of the field. Audio performance was actually very similar to the Asus ROG Strix TRX40-E Gaming with a dynamic range of 111dBA and noise level of -109dBA, with only the far more expensive Asus Zenith and MSI Creator boards able to offer anything better.  For some reason, Gigabyte was a little behind on the storage results, and we saw the same with the TRX40 Aorus Xtreme, too. Here, the M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD speeds were even lower, not topping 4,700MB/sec when we usually see around 5,000MB/sec on the read speed, while the write speed of 3,963MB/sec was lower than the usual 4,200MB/sec, too. These aren't going to result in even marginally noticeable impacts, though, but it's something to be aware of and doesn't seem to be related to M.2 cooling either, which was acceptable and our SSD was far too cool to be throttling.

Conclusion

With a similar price to other sub-£500 TRX40 boards, including the Asus ROG Strix TRX40-E Gaming, the Gigabyte TRX40 Aorus Master needed to stand out to warrant our top award, but while it offers numerous unique features, it doesn't really have us running for our wallets. However, those unique features, such as the best fan and cooling control around, good VRM cooling and more typical features such as overclocking and testing tools, mean that it's easily a match for similarly-priced boards out there and comes recommended, especially if you'll be building a high-end water-cooled PC.