AORUS XTREME Z390 Gaming Motherboard Review

AORUS XTREME Z390

The latest motherboard from AORUS is designed to do one thing, take down any competition and become king of the Z390 motherboards. It’s big, it’s loud, and it’s built to go fast. Of course, that also means it’s going to be a bit expensive too, but such is the way of a flagship motherboard.

With the Aorus Pro and the Aorus Master currently dominating many of our performance charts, the XTREME promises to just edge out a little more performance. It should do this thanks to its extreme design. It features a whopping 16 phase power design, with a massively improved motherboard cooling system. That includes four heat pipes and triple the standard surface area for the heatsinks. Keeping with the “extreme” theme, it features triple M.2 mounts with Thermal Guard, AQUANTIA 10 GbE LAN and Intel CNVi 902.11ac WiFi, high-end audio with the ALC1220-VB and ESS SABRE DAC chipsets, reinforced hardware, and a boatload of connectivity.

XTREME Overclocking

This motherboard comes with a few cool gadgets too. There’s the OC Touch Panel, a breakout PCB with a set of controls for controlling the BIOS. You can tweak the CPU ratios, BCLK, Voltages and more without rebooting your system.

“GIGABYTE OC Touch provides an array of physical buttons and switches to bring access to overclocking features at your fingertips—making overclocking on the fly extremely fast and easy.” – Gigabyte AORUS

XTREME Lighting

It also comes bundled with the fantastic RGB Fusion software, a huge amount of built-in addressable LED lights on the motherboard, and the AORUS RGB Fan Commander. This peripheral device allows you to control lighting effects, fan speeds, and more, for up to 8 fans, or RGB/addressable lighting strips.

Features

• Supports 9th and 8th Gen Intel^® Core™ Processors
• Dual Channel Non-ECC Unbuffered DDR4, 4 DIMMs
• Intel^® Optane™ Memory Ready
• 16 Phases IR Digital VRM Solution with PowIRstage
• Cutting-edge Thermal Design with Fins-Array Heatsink, Direct Touch Heatpipe and NanoCarbon Baseplate
• Onboard Intel CNVI 802.11ac 2×2 Wave 2 Wi-Fi with All new AORUS Antenna
• 127dB SNR AMP-UP Audio with High-End ESS SABRE 9018K2M DAC, LME 49720 and OPA1622 OP-AMP, WIMA audio capacitors
• AQUANTIA^® 10GbE BASE-T LAN and Intel^® Gigabit LAN with cFosSpeed
• Intel^® Thunderbolt™ 3 onboard
• Exclusive RGB FAN COMMANDER and OC Touch for professional case modders and overclockers
• USB TurboCharger for mobile device fast charge support
• RGB FUSION with Multi-Zone Addressable LED Light Show design, support Addressable LED & RGB LED strips
• Smart Fan 5 features Multiple Temperature Sensors and Hybrid Fan Headers with FAN STOP
• Front USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C™ Header
• Triple Ultra-Fast M.2 with PCIe Gen3 x4 interface with Triple Thermal Guards

What AORUS Had to Say

“Innovative design, cutting-edge functionality, state-of-the-art aesthetics, sophisticated thermal design, next generation network connectivity ,Hi-Fi level audio system. Z390 AORUS XTREME is the new definition of a flagship motherboard.” – AORUS

Specifications

For in-depth specifications, please visit the official AORUS product page here.