MSI Creator TRX40 Motherboard (AMD sTRX4, PCIe Gen4, M.2, USB3.2 Gen2x2, DDR4, 10G LAN, Wi-Fi 6, eATX)

Board is great but content creators should take a careful note about the included NVMe expansion card...I have this paired with a Threadripper 3970x, dual 2080tis, and an aver media 4k capture card. All watercooled.The board is well built and laid out but there is something to note about the included NVME aero expansion card.You are instructed to put the 4x nvme expansion card into Pci lane 3 as the connectivity of the PCI-e lanes is 16/8/16/8.This is all fine UNLESS you are wanting to run dual GPUs like I do.This board is built around the threadripper 3 chipset and that is aimed at content creators.I bought all the parts for this rig (and this board specifically) for taking advantage of Davinci Resolve. I wanted to use the aero expansion card as a raid array for my cache disk when working on projects.No good with how the PCi lanes are sorted. I originally thought it would be all 16x for all 4 lanes as the TR3 chips have enough PCIe lanes to handle that and then some. WHY they did this when this board is aimed at content creators, I'm not sure. I'd love to be able to use all 4 slots on the board...especially for the price point.I ended up using all 3 on board nvme slots with NVMe_3 and a 1tb PCie 4.0 NVMe drive as my cache drive.Board is awesome. Just wish I had foresight about the bandwidth structure before finding out the nvme expansion aero card and 2x GPUs being incompatible.Additionally, if you onyl run 1 GPU and plan on running the aero expander card, please see the compatibilty list on the MSI site for compatible NVME drives and note that the aero expander card DOES NOT SUPPORT PCIe 4.0 cardsThe tech reviewers on YT fail to mention that one.

With proper settings I'm running Linux 5.6 kernel (Ubuntu 20.04), with AMD Ryzen 3970x Threadripper CPU and 128GB G.Skill Neo RAM, without problems. The BIOS is pretty straight forward and it's XAMP feature got me top clock speed out of my RAM without even blinking. Manages all the fans excellently and lets all the cooling stuff be observed and tweaked. I like the board first and foremost because it works for what I got it for, and secondly because it looks cool in a Coolmaster case.The only think I am struggling with is to get its Wireless adapter to connect to my ASUS RT-AC88U wirelessly. Right now I'm not able to get it to authenticate with my router with wpa_supplicant, but that could be a lot of things unrelated to the MOBO.

I recently built a HEDT using the MSI Creator TRX40, a Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, and 256GB of NEMIX ECC DDR4-3200 RAM.I'm doing the VFIO IOMMU passthrough thing using Fedora 32 (linux) as the virtualization host. IOMMU groupings on the motherboard are good with most (though not all) PCI devices placed in their own group. I had problems passing through the onboard (or perhaps on-CPU) AMD Starship USB 3.0 Host Controller due to PCI FLR (function level reset) problems, but a one line kernel patch fixed that problem. (I've sent the patch to the Linux kernel PCI maintainers; it's been accepted and should eventually make its way into kernels used by all distros; some may already have it.)I'm very happy that the MSI Creator motherboard works well with the RAM that I chose. I wanted to use some fairly fast ECC RAM, but the motherboard requires that it be "unbuffered" and such RAM seems to be fairly rare. With some trepidation, I bought NEMIX RAM from another vendor; I didn't have qualms about the vendor (who is reputable), but I didn't have any experience with NEMIX. (Search for "NEMIX RAM 64GB 2x32GB DDR4-3200 PC4-25600 2Rx8 ECC Unbuffered Memory".) So far, the system has been running reliably using all 256GB running at the rated speed of 3200MHz. Yay!I'm using all three M.2 slots. Make sure you read the manual regarding use of these slots. There are some standoffs that should be removed when using long M.2 cards. I didn't remove these at first; thankfully, nothing was damaged. The covers over these slots apparently act as a heat sink - pretty neat!I'm also using all four of the PCI-e slots; 3 video cards, two for virtual machines and one for the virtualization host. The last slot has an HBA (host bus adapter) connected to an SSD backplane. I probably could find use for one more slot if the board had it. That said, my research prior to purchase showed that none of the available crop of TRX40 motherboards had more than four slots.The MSI Creator has a truly impressive number of USB ports. The back panel alone has more than I really need, but there are also a number of connectors on the MB for both USB 2 and USB 3. I've been able to pass through two USB controllers to (two) VMs. There's another AMD Starship controller available for passing through to a(nother) VM if required.A BIOS reset switch is available from the back panel; I've used it a few times and found it to be very convenient. There's also a two digit status display on the motherboard which shows what stage it's in (or gets stuck at) when booting. I found this to be really useful when debugging problems during inital bring-up. Likewise, the on-board power switch and reset switch are really nice since there's no front panel with the ST-BC1 benchtable that I used for system bring-up.I used the SATA ports during initial bring-up. They work fine, but I wanted to connect more than 6 drives, hence the HBA. I found that I could pass through the SATA controllers to one of the VMs. I've tested this pass-through with both a hard disk and an optical drive; no problems encountered. There are actually two SATA controllers shown by linux's lspci command. So, presumably, you could assign one controller each to two different VMs, though I have not tested this.The board / CPU combo is very fast for VM use. I benchmarked VM to host network performance using iperf3. It shows a bitrate of 32.4 Gbits/sec. This is about 50% faster than the previous generation of Ryzen TR / motherboard (2950x + ASRock X399). Also, for the workload that I care about (building code for software development), this system is roughly twice as fast as the 2950x + ASRock X399 that I built just 1.5 years ago.

I picked up this board to pair with a Threadripper 3970x. The last computer I built was a dual Xeon setup on a Supermicro motherboard from 2007. I was pretty nervous and tried my best to break this thing (to include dropping the Threadripper while in its case). I think through sheer luck I got this thing to post right off the bat, because I'm an artist (bad) and not a computer builder. I guess somehow I did it right. Using a Corsair MP600 M2 for my OS drive and this thing will cold boot before the Kurig finishes making a coffee. Temps run from 38-50c (all aircooling) in a Fractal Design Meshify S2. I am still kinda shocked I was able to build this thing and not destroy it accidentally.