ASRock TRX50 WS motherboard review: explosive performance

There’s something fantastic about owning the biggest and baddest hardware. Who doesn’t want a kick-ass CPU and monster graphics card? Top-notch Ryzen and Core are all well and good on the processor front, but let me be honest with you. There’s an entirely different level of multi-core performance available from the latest workstation models. AMD’s impressive Ryzen Threadripper 7980X is a brilliant chip for those with deep enough pockets. Based on a new platform, unlocking the beast requires motherboard and memory upgrades. ASRock reckons it has the best-supporting solution with the TRX50 WS motherboard. Yours for a cool £800.

As a reminder, the TRX50 chipset supports both regular and Pro versions of AMD’s latest Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Series. While the $10,000 champion Pro 79950WX works just fine, be aware that TRX50’s quad memory channels don’t make the most of that processor’s 8-channel architecture. For that, you need to invest in a WRX90 motherboard.

Nevertheless, despite this being the ‘lesser’ chipset, it’s packed to the gills with potential. The 12-layer eATX board weighs in at a whopping 2,725g, whose bulk is augmented by a large metal heatsink on the rear.

Immediately catching the eye, ASRock believes active cooling is necessary atop the 24-phase power supply. This decision’s hard to comprehend as the underlying heatsinks are robust and connected via heatpipes. In fact, the attention to cooling is as good as on any high-end consumer motherboard.

Active cooling

Giving ASRock the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the onboard fan decision is made to ensure enhanced reliability when running 350W processors for many hours on end. Truth be told, the four 40mm spinners, on at all times, are a bit of an eyesore. If you’re completely unhappy with their presence, you can easily remove the fans. Doing so frees up a couple of four-pin headers, too. Asus, for example, does without any additional fans on its comparison Pro WS TRX50 Sage WiFi motherboard.

It’s usual to have M.2 slots situated between PCIe x16. ASRock, however, shifts the two main slots over to the chipset section. The topmost operates at PCIe 5.0 x4 and is connected to the CPU, whereas the one below is limited to PCIe 4.0 x4 and runs off the chipset.

This is not as stingy as it first seems. ASRock also includes three extra connectors not usually seen on consumer boards. The first is an MCIO PCIe 5.0 x4 running from the CPU. The other two are SlimSAS SFF-8654 (SCSI) also emanating from the CPU but interfacing at PCIe 4.0 x4. There are also four regular SATA 6Gbps connectors for older drives. On balance, the storage quotient is just about right for a top-tier workstation board.

TRX50 is not the expansion god that WRX90 is. This means the PCIe 5.0 lane count drops from 128 to 48 here. In other words, ASRock needs to be sensible in allocating lanes across physical PCIe x16 and storage-optimised PCIe x4.

The upshot is that all five of the slots you see run off the CPU. Breaking it down, there’s PCIe 5.0 x16, PCIe 5.0 x16, PCIe 5.0 x4, PCIe 4.0 x16, and PCIe 4.0 x16. This makes sense, as ASRock needs to retain at least eight 5.0 lanes for storage.

Feature-heavy spec

For users seeking high-octane GPUs running alongside a powerful CPU, the expansion arrangement facilitates three double-slot cards. The board is, therefore, capable of housing three slimline GeForce RTX 4090s.

The huge SP6 socket dominates. AMD sets the exclusion zone around it, ensuring getting a chip in and out is straightforward. All the pins are located in the socket, so do be careful when placing a £5,000 Ryzen Threadripper 7980X into the sled tray. Appreciating the lofty 350W TDP, I’d recommend an AIO cooler, and AMD duly includes an Astetek-compatible bracket in the CPU box.

The four DIMM slots surrounding the socket need DDR5 ECC memory, meaning you can’t plonk your standard Ryzen or Core RAM. Let me be clear: opting to go down this route requires a complete platform overhaul – CPU, motherboard, and memory.

A quick tip: the motherboard-mounted PCIe 6-pin power connector needs connecting before the GPU awakens, even if a 12VHPWR cable is present and correct.

Another tip is to remove the two memory sticks near the PCIe slot before trying to disengage the card. If you don’t, it’s nigh-on impossible to reach the tiny latch. I’d like to see a GPU-detaching mechanism available in the form of an Asus-like button.

TRX50 WS’s I/O section is pretty good. 10GbE Ethernet is accompanied by 2.5GbE. The two Type-C ports carry 20Gbps and 10Gbps speeds, respectively, but there’s no inherent Thunderbolt 4 functionality seeing as this is an AMD motherboard. Don’t fret, though, as there’s a PCB TB4 connector that supports an ASRock card. WiFi 6E is a nice bonus, too.

Firmware

The firmware enables easy adjustments in an intuitive manner. Memory ‘training’ takes about a minute with the latest BIOS, after which the board boots fairly quickly into Windows. Running at DDR5-6400 is no problem whatsoever. The four fans can be effectively silenced by a trip into the ‘Fan-tastic’ section. There, you’ll pull down the coloured ‘blobs’ so the fans don’t switch on until the temperature hits at least 76°C. Trust me, you’ll want to do this because the default sound profile is, to my ears at least, rather annoying.

Methodology

Performance

I’m comparing the ASRock TRX50 / 7980X performance against the leading consumer platforms running ASRock X670E Taichi (AMD) and Z790 Taichi (Intel) boards. The idea is to understand how much faster a true workstation king is. First off, the light load Photoshop test shows it doesn’t make sense to invest in a solution like this if most of your workload barely tickles the cores.

Quad-channel memory running at DDR5-6345 is a bit of a beast, offering twice as much bandwidth as the next-best solution.

CPU-centric tests

Consider a board like the ASRock TRX50 WS if heavy-duty rendering is your bread and butter. A Ryzen Threadripper 7980X is three times as fast as a very decent consumer chip.

Swings and roundabouts. As we’ve seen before, single-core performance isn’t stellar because the test chip doesn’t boost as high as the other pair, but I imagine you won’t be spending too much time running a few cores at a time.

ASRock’s TRX50 Pro runs the 7980X chip at around 3.9GHz when all threads are blazing along. Enough to offer wonderful numbers far removed from consumer champions.

A Crucial T700 PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe SSD paves the way for serious bandwidth on all platforms.

Gaming

Can this £8,000 PC game? Yes, it can, though not as quickly as the other pair.

Power and efficiency

Understanding the performance scope should cause no alarm at the 530W system-wide power consumption. Truth be told, it’s frugal on a per-core basis, as shown below.

Here, I divide the V-Ray score by the observed wattage. What do you know, the ASRock TRX50 and 7980X combination streaks ahead.

Conclusion

There are understandably few motherboard choices when building a top-notch workstation from AMD. The nascent Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Series sits on a brand-new TRX50 platform that requires serious know-how, and few are trusted to do it well.

ASRock puts its workstation foot forward with the TRX50 WS. The big brute of a board fits in all the gubbins you’d expect at the £800 price point, yet the inclusion of four VRM heatsink fans raises eyebrows. Designed as a safety measure when a 350W CPU is under the pump, you can thankfully turn them off in firmware during moderate loads. I’d go so far as to say they spoil the aesthetic of what is otherwise a good-looking bit of kit.

Nevertheless, anyone wanting a dependable, no-fuss solution for the latest Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Series can rest easy that ASRock’s TRX50 WS is up to the task of taming best-in-breed processors.