A Closer Look
The Aorus motherboard looks fantastic, with mostly black hardware and a few shiny highlights giving it a really nice contrast. There’s a lot more black and white type motherboards hitting the market now. Of course, that’s not a bad thing, as this looks great and it’s going to show off the RGB lighting much better than a brightly coloured motherboard would.
At the top, you’ll find a pair of chunky heat sinks keeping the power delivery hardware nice and cool. They look great finished in black, and match up nicely with that angular rear I/O guard. Of course, they’ll also help the motherboard perform better, and maintain overclocks.
The board uses high-quality 10K Black Capacitors, which promise high performance and a very long lifespan.
Four armoured DIMM slots comes with their own RGB light bars. Their reinforced design will prevent the motherboard from bending, and improve the general life span of the slots.
Connectivity
There are plenty of connectivity options on this motherboard, supporting storage devices of all shapes and sizes.
Those using multiple graphics cards will be happy, with three full-size PCIe slots. The top two are spaced to support a pair of extra-thick graphics cards in SLI. Of course, with regular dual-slot cards, you should be able to fit up to three of them too.
There are M.2 drive mounts built into the motherboard, allowing for Raid 0 for extremely fast loading times.
The rear I/O isn’t as packed as I would like for a gaming motherboard. However, there’s just enough USB ports, and a Type-C for good measure. There’s also a PS2 port, Killer LAN, optical, and audio jacks. Display connections come from the HDMI port, and a single DisplayPort.
Finally, you’ll find the audio hardware mounted in the bottom left. It uses a trace on the motherboard to isolate the signals, a powerful amp, and Japanese Nichicon Audio Capacitors. One nice feature, albeit one that only the big enthusiasts will use, is the swappable Op-AMP; TI Burr Brown® NE5532P operational amplifier.
