Gigabyte Aorus X399 Gaming 7 Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

All prices are correct as of 13/09/2017

At £338.48 the Aorus AMD Threadripper X399 Gaming 7 TR4 ATX motherboard doesn’t come cheap. However, given the level of features on offer, it’s certainly competitive in the X399 motherboard market. Is it expensive? Absolutely, but when you’re shopping for a multi-GPU high-end rendering and gaming system, with a £1000 CPU and much more, it’s still likely the most affordable main component of that build.

Overview

Motherboards obviously come in many variants, and finding the right one for you is not always that easy. This motherboard certainly isn’t for everyone, and for that matter, neither is the Threadripper CPU. For the day to day gamer, something like the Z270 platform from Intel more than enough. AMD fans will find all they need in B350 and X370 motherboards too. However, if you’re a big content creator, a humble quad-core CPU just isn’t going to cut it, not only do you play games, you stream them, you render videos for social media and YouTube. On top of that, you maybe using video overlay software, chat clients, monitoring tools, and lots of editing software. If you need to do all of that at the same time, Threadripper has a lot to offer.

Why This Motherboard?

As I said, Threadripper is a bit of a mixed bag for day-to-day gaming. Of course, it can do so much more at the same time. The Gaming 7 motherboard has all the features a content creator and gamer is likely to need, and more. With three M.2 storage drives, you’ll get blazing fast performance for quick loading times of games, as well as smoother video editing. There’s a lot of storage options with USB 2, 3, 3.1 and Type C, plenty of SATA ports, and five full-size PCIe lanes. That means you can hook up huge banks of storage, powerful expansion cards, external video devices and much more. Overall, it ticks all the boxes for both a high-end workstation build, as well as an extreme gaming system.

Extreme Gaming and Beyond!

With Threadripper offering up a whopping 64 PCIe lanes, getting the most out of multiple graphics cards and NVMe PCIe storage devices couldn’t be easier. Add to that quad-channel DDR4 support, and more, and this motherboard is going to help you build the extreme system of your dreams. Sure, Intel has their rival offerings too and Gigabyte has motherboards in that part of the market. However, AMD and Intel are both singing slightly different, but competing songs these days, and it’s amazing to see AMD products like the Gaming 7 and Threadripper that are competitive in this part of the market. Let’s be honest, it’s been a long time since we could say that with confidence.

Added Value

At £338.48 you’re going to want a lot in return for your investment. We’ve already covered the basics, but what else is on offer? With full RGB lighting built into all major motherboard components, as well as support for syncing other Gigabyte hardware and RGBW/-UV LED lighting strips, customisation is plentiful. Add to that, built-in WiFi and GbE networking, powerful onboard ALC 1220 audio processing, BIOS Flashback, onboard BIOS Debug and power controls, SmartFan 5, and more.

Pros

• Competitive performance
• Competitive price
• Server-level power deliver components
• Durable heat-sink design
• Powerful AMD and DAC design
• EasyTune
• Built-in WiFi
• Extensive RGB LED configuration and expansion options
• 4-Way SLI/CF Support
• Stylish design
• 3 x M.2 storage mounts
• Excellent connectivity

Cons

• Some synthetic benchmarks should perform better, we expect future BIOS updates will fix this

“If you’re eager to jump into the world of Threadripper, the Gaming 7 is one of the more competitive options on the market today. It’s packed full of features, has a stylish design and is priced pretty fairly against rival offerings.”