Gigabyte X570 AORUS XTREME Motherboard Review
Peter Donnell / 5 years ago
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The AORUS X570 XTREME is certainly a fantastic looking motherboard. The whole thing is pretty much all armoured heatsinks and heatpipes. Not only does it make it look like a panel off of Batman’s armour, but it’s also practical too. The armoured heatsinks are there to cool those massive VRMs. However, as you can see, there’s a heat pipe that extends the cooling all the way down to the chipset in the bottom right. This is the only X570 motherboard (that we know of) which does not have an active fan to cool the chipset. That alone makes it stand out from the huge range of motherboards launching today.
The power delivery is serious business too. You’ll find 2 x 8 pin PSU headers, feeding through a 2x Copper 8 Layer PCB, and a Direct 16 Phase Digital VRM. That’s likely more than anyone ever needs. However, if you’re pushing the limits of AMD’s latest flagship CPUs under liquid cooling or even LN2, that level of power stability could be what breaks world records.
On the right, you’ll find a plethora of connections for fans and RGB headers. There’s also some large on-board power buttons, which is superb if you’re on a test-bench like I am. However, the most amazing thing here is that there are absolutely no right angle headers for the power cables and storage device.
Power
The whole right side of the motherboard is side mounted connectors. This is going to work wonders for your cable routing and management. It just looks fantastic, and I be many other brands will follow suit with a similar design on their high-end boards in the future.
Of course, we’ve got PCIe 4.0, with three full-size armoured lanes, as well triple M.2 mounts hiding behind all that armour. Well, not just armour, again, it’s all heatsink that will help improve the high-end performance of your new drives.
The back row is just as sexy as the rest of this motherboard too. Of course, you’ll notice the built-in I/O shield, so no forgetting that during the installation. There’s a plethora of USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports as well as a lovely Type-C port. There are 10 GbE and 1 GbE networking for all your LAN needs and then some. Plus, WiFi 6 thrown in, so you’re literally getting the best networking you could ask for here. Throw in those handy BIOS buttons too. Finally, Hi-Res audio outputs powered by the mighty ALC1220-VB & ESS SABRE 9218 DAC with WIMA Audio Capacitors and you couldn’t ask for much more here.
