I have one computer with Gigabyte X399 Aorus Xtreme and it is an utter crap, especially the firmware. It randomly resets its settings, even after you just saved them. Sometimes it takes few reboots to get it to acknowledge, that yes, I did enable AMD SVM and want to use it.
But they are not at all? TRX40 is way too expensive for a gaming system and these processors do not target gamers. The only a little bit gamicky TRX40 boards are the two Asus ROG boards, and even there the gaming marketing is toned down a lot on their product pages. The ASRock TRX40 Taichi looks maybe a little bit as well like that, because of the RGB lightning. But all of those are firmly workstation board, with the huge amount of expansions slots you'd expect from that socket. And literally every other board I saw is either called a Pro, Extreme, or Design/Creator board.
They do target gamers and enthusiast "must have it" types, check AMD's and mobo manufacturers's marketing - it is their halo product.
Of course, it makes no sense if you only game. TRX40 platform can be better used as a workstation but is indeed expensive, I would say too expensive, for what you get. Only 4 DDR channels, only 256GB RAM at max, only expensive unbuffered DDR4. Most TRX40 boards have only one 10Gbit NIC. Only 4 PCIe slots... This is 2010 level tech.
The only real selling point of this is TR CPU performance and performance per cpu cost, but otherwise this is a mediocre platform. It does have PCIe 4, yes, but that has little benefits for now. "Pro, Extreme, Creator" tags do not make this on par with the established Xeon workstation platforms. This is how a high-end workstation board looks like:
I see what you mean (though that marketing is still not gamery!). But I think there is value there, in that clear messaging. The Threadripper board and processors are better available and their capabilities clearly understandable when you come from a consumer platform. The Supermicro board and Xeon cpus (and Xeon prices!) are maybe more relatable when your background is in servers, but utterly confusing otherwise. Too many skus, no marketing material at all that makes them understandable to consumers, very high prices, no boards from brands consumers know. And the prosumer line Intel is pushing instead as Threadripper alternative is crap.
And that's Intel fault, by basically blocking consumers a few years ago from using and buying Xeon processors...
You meant 4x PCIe slots? That must be a joke. Even x299 with only 28 PCIe lanes has 7... TRX40 could happily support 8x PCIe 3 slots, but nobody makes such board.
x299 does not have 4xPCI-E 4.0 x16. It technically can't support that.
But no, I meant basically everything else. The amount of ram, USB, SATA and M.2 slots as well as USB headers is nice, compared to regular consumer board at the very least.
x299 gives you 7x PCIe 3 x4 slots. That might be surprisingly good enough even for GPUs. And most motherboards can reconfigure number of lanes per slot.
Now imagine having an 8-slot motherboard for 3990X that could be configured to e.g. 4x PCIe 4 x16 or 8x PCIe 3 x16. Wouldn't you like such motherboard?
For Deep Learning I don't really care about PCIe 4.0, but I do care about being able to fit as many GPUs in as I can (they talk to each other outside PCIe anyway). With TRX40 I am limited to 4 GPUs. Even PCIe 3 x8 is good enough for DL.
