A Closer Look
This motherboard looks absolutely stunning, and surprisingly brighter than most these days too. Rather than just black, a lot of the hardware has a gorgeous grey brushed aluminium finish that should provide an interesting contrast in your next PC build. There’s a dose of RGB thrown in too, but features a more tasteful design overall.
There’s a ton of M.2 slots with one PCIe gen 5 slot at the top and a further three below the first x16 slot, of which one is gen 5 ready, while the other two have gen 4 support all covered by more covers.
Of course, all of these covers aren’t just for show, as it’s all there to act as cooling and protection for everything from the storage bays to the VRMs. It’s a heavy motherboard because of this, but it should mean it can take a significant amount of heat from the major hardware and keep it performing at its best. Even at the back, a huge backplate keeps the board rigid and adds even more surface area for cooling so I’m expecting good things from it.
In terms of branding, along with the AORUS logo, there’s a “Team Up. Fight On” slogan in the top left M.2 heatsink, keeping the AORUS tradition of slightly cringey words on products, but overall it’s pretty cool. The heatsink sits just beneath the top PCIe 5 x16 slot, but there are two more slots below it for add-in cards meaning they shouldn’t cover up any usable slots or get in the way.
