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While the TRX40 Aorus Xtreme had the best overclocked bandwidth in SiSoftware Sandra, it also had the lowest default overclock at standard XMP settings. Fortunately, its latency was still the best.
Though the bars on the chart move around a bit, the TRX40 Aorus Xtreme’s strongest competitor in 3DMark and PCMark appears to be the $700 Creator TRX40.
The TRX40 Aorus Xtreme sneaks past the ROG Zenith II Extreme in Ashes, but Asus returns the favor in F1 2017. We’re still not close to determining a true winner.
Asus’ lower completion times in several workloads spell trouble for Gigabyte, but MSI tops both by a miniscule margin.
Power, Heat and Efficiency
Even though it's feature-heavy, the TRX40 Aorus Xtreme matches the TRX40 Taichi for lowest power consumption. Depending on average performance, that could prove favorable in our efficiency rating.
The TRX40 Aorus Xtreme’s voltage regulator shows higher temperatures compared to rivals, but a look at its fan ramp shows that the fan doesn’t even kick on until it reaches 85 degrees C. Our test was conducted in a 21-degree room, so the fan wasn’t on.
To assure readers that our readings were close to accurate, we attached four thermocouples to the back of the board, beneath its voltage regulator. Unfortunately, this means that our thermocouples were being cooled by the backplate, since the backplate cools the voltage regulator through a thermal pad. Gigabyte’s onboard thermistor placement appears far more ideal than any place we could find to stick our own devices.
Given that the best location for our thermocouples was compromised by integrated cooling, we retaped our sensors in a nearby location where there was no backplate contact, behind the VR Chokes. Our thermometor’s readings increased by a few degrees but remain lower than the integrated thermistor, which is likely due to its greater distance from the heat source.
While the TRX40 Aorus Xtreme wasn’t the top performer, it did beat its closest rival in our regular benchmarks and took second place overall. Moreover, the performance difference between all four boards was only 0.6%, and the TRX40 Aorus Xtreme’s relatively low power consumption gave it the top efficiency score.
Conclusion
Value seekers love a chart that shows the board with the fewest features marching victorious over its rivals, but we perceive these as mere entertainment when onboard hardware is so disparate.
The real rivalry here is between the TRX40 Aorus Xtreme and ROG Zenith II Extreme. And not only are these boards fairly close to each other in price, but also performance and feature value. But, the difficulty we faced in getting CPU overclocking adjustments to “stick” causes us to lean slightly toward Asus, though we could understand if someone else chose the TRX40 Aorus Xtreme for its superior network controller and PCIe slot arrangement.
We still have another $850 board, the Zenith II Extreme Alpha, to test. Will that model reveal itself the true leader?
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