Gigabyte B760M Aorus Elite AX Motherboard Review

How Much Does It Cost?

Honestly, I know that B760M is meant to be the more affordable chipset compared to the latest Z-series of motherboards, but I also know that AORUS are usually the flagship series for Gigabyte, so I honestly expected this motherboard to be much more expensive than it is. However, at £178.81, it’s not cheap, but for what you get, well, it’s pretty darn impressive. It’s about the same price as similar options from MSI, and ASRock, and about £20 cheaper than the equivalent ASUS Prime motherboard.

Overview

In terms of design, I think AORUS have got it spot on with this motherboard. However, while it’s clear that there are some cost savings with respect to this chipset and the target audience, the premium features are spaced out in such a way, that you would be fooled into thinking this is a much more expensive model than it is. The cost savings are sensible though, such as the bottom PCIe slot only having rudimentary reinforcement, which is absolutely fine. The heatsinks are not linked with heatpipes as we see on high-end models, which is again, just fine. The DDR5 slots aren’t armoured, and there are more USB 2 ports, and fewer type-C and 3.2 ports, but it’s not like it has none of them, so again, that’s fine with me

The overall build quality is very good though, and the heatsinks are a respectable size, while the overall VRM configuration is pretty competent, allowing confidence when it comes to pushing big boost clocks on the higher series of i7 and i9 CPUs. Those running 24/7 rendering tasks will still likely want a Z-series with more robust VRM and heatsinks, as it can get a bit warm, but for daily work and gaming, the B760M Aorus Elite AX is going to hold up really well.

There’s room to improve on the overall memory performance too, I think the latency being a little high is telling of a BIOS issue, and one I suspect will be patched up in the not too distant future, as these kinds of issues usually are, so I’m not overly concerned about it at this time. When it came to real world gaming performance, it was a great a largely great experience.

Should I Buy One?

The Gigabyte B760M Aorus Elite AX Motherboard gets a big thumbs up from me just for being both micro-ATX and having a cool aesthetic, as it’s going to be great for a more compact mid-tower gaming PC build. However, it has some very competent connectivity, fast networking, and is well suited to your typical 1 GPU, 1 expansion card gaming PC build with a couple of fast M.2 drives, most of us simply don’t need more than that, yet it still mostly matched the performance of the much more expensize Z-series motherboards.