Final Thoughts
How Much Does it Cost?
By far my favourite feature of this motherboard is the price. At around £160 from most retailers, it’s still fairly expensive, but actually pretty cheap given the performance figures. It’s going up against £300 flagship models and coming in just behind them in all our benchmarks. It’s beating out most other Z390 motherboards with ease, even ones that cost the same or more. For such a quality product, you’ll be hard pushed to beat it at this price range; mini-ITX or otherwise.
Overview
The Aorus Xtreme motherboards we reviewed, as well as the Pro and Master, blew us away with their quality and performance. While this mini-ITX model may have a much more compact form factor, the size is not limiting its performance as much as you would expect. Aorus has still packed some serious power delivery hardware that allows for great overclocking. It may not be as “XTREME” as the flagship ATX, but giving the performance is has done, with limited motherboard space for hardware, is very impressive.
Performance
The mini-ITX didn’t break any performance records today, but it’s still a fast motherboard. When it comes to number crunching and pushing our i9-9900K to the max, we saw no issues with throttling or limitations of any kind. The VRM cooling, power delivery, etc, are all very capable. This was especially reflected in the overclocking, as the CPU was comfortable at 5 GHz all-cores all day long here. Furthermore, the blazing gaming performance was proof this motherboard lives up to its gaming credentials.
Connectivity
Aorus hasn’t skimped on the details here either. Most importantly for me, I love good quality audio. With the award-winning ALC1220 chipset and good quality audio capacitors, you really couldn’t ask for much more from your motherboard. Onboard sound isn’t what it used to be, and you’ll not be left wanting for more here.
For storage, you’ve got a bank of SATA ports, USB 2.0, 3.0, Type-C and Gen 2 to play with too. Of course, if you want to push your gaming loading times even further, the super-fast M.2 mount will do the job for storage or Optane, and that chunky cooler will ensure your high-performance drive is kept protected and cool while it’s put to work.
For networking, you have a choice of both Gigabit LAN or high-speed WiFi for maximum flexibility.
Added Value
The Aorus Pro WiFi ticks all the right boxes for performance. However, with the inclusion of RGB LED lighting, an addressable lighting header, a good number of fan headers, reinforced DIMMs and PCIe slot, high-speed memory support, and more, you’re certainly getting good value for money.
