Comments on: MSI Creator TRX40 Motherboard Review for Content Creators

By: VD

VD — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 14:55:00 +0000

The board does not support out-of-box SR-IOV, I was able to enable it (after a couple of days of research) with a workaround for it in KVM (not sure it’s even possible in Windows virtualisation or VMWare).

MSI kindly agreed to build a custom BIOS to enable that but also stated that the feature will never make it into an official BIOS.

If you want SR-IOV, look elsewhere (or ask for a custom BIOS – assuming MSI will be willing to do it) and before you buy any TRX40 motherboard, ask the manufacturer.

The trouble with custom BIOS is that there’s no “tracking” – once it is issued, there’s no guarantee MSI will rebuild it when new official BIOSes are released.

By: Brent Thale

Brent Thale — Mon, 20 Jan 2020 23:34:34 +0000

@Aaron Do you know how to build Unreal Engine 4 from source? I would love to see how fast that ThreadRipper machine can build it. My 6 core machine takes 73 minutes for reference.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 13:58:42 +0000

Pity they didnt include BMC/IPMI..

By: Aaron

Aaron — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 08:56:13 +0000

We currently have one of these boards with a 3960X and 7 FireCuda 520 PCIe 4 2TB drives. I have configured six of them in RAID 0. I can tell you it’s stupidly fast (>20gbps synthetic disk performance)!

I’d be curious to know what people think is the best memory option for this board.

By: Paul A Mitchell

Paul A Mitchell — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 02:43:15 +0000

Many thanks, William: Please permit me to share one of my pet peeves about NVMe.
You will hopefully recall how multiple integrated SATA ports eventually became standard
with full support for all modern RAID modes. It is my sincere hope that motherboard
and storage vendors will make it an industry goal to integrate full BOOTABLE support
for all modern RAID modes for any number of integrated M.2 ports. We have had a
lot of success formatting SSD RAID-0 arrays with Windows drive letters C: / E: and
with D: typically assigned to a hard-wired optical drive. We will only upgrade to
a TR system, like this excellent MSI motherboard, unless we can do fresh OS installs
to a fast RAID-0 array of multiple M.2 NVMe drives. Because we also rely a lot
on large ramdisks in our workstations, we need a fast non-volatile partition
where the latest ramdisk contents can be saved at SHUTDOWN and then
restored quickly at the next STARTUP. The ramdisk software we are currently
using has a neat “block” logic, which only requires saving logical blocks which
have changed since the most recent STARTUP. Given the speed we anticipate
with Gen4 M.2 RAID-0 arrays, the STARTUP and SHUTDOWN sequences should
be so incredibly fast as to be almost unnoticeable! Thanks again. /s/ Paul