Gigabyte Z370 AORUS Gaming K3 Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The Gigabyte Aorus Gaming K3 Z370 Motherboard is available now from pretty much every major retailer. It’s pretty reasonably priced too at just £135.71 on Amazon.co.uk. Of course, this is not the cheapest Z370 motherboard, but it’s a long shot from the most expensive. Given that the performance was as good as more costly motherboards, and undoubtedly competitive while gaming, it’s a bargain for anyone building their next gaming PC.

Overview

There’s not a lot on this motherboard that stands out and makes me say “wow.” However, at £130 it doesn’t have to blow me away, and motherboards with crazy features typically start at around twice the price of this one. It’s far from the bottom end though, and you get pretty much everything you’ll need for a mid to high-end gaming PC.

Aesthetics

The motherboard is pretty bare concerning hardware, but a beautiful layout and some cleverly placed decals keep it looking exciting. The enormous Aorus bird on the PCB, as well as the RGB lit Aorus bird on the chipset heatshield look superb. Black and red highlights on the VRM cooler, DIMM slots, and on the PCIe slots give it some added gaming flair too. I would have like to see the DIMM slots armoured to match the two PCIe slots, purely for aesthetic reasons, but as it is, it looks great. Of course, the PCIe slots are more vital to have armour these days, especially with the weight of modern graphics cards.

Performance

At this price range, the Aorus Gaming K3 motherboard is ticking all the right boxes. It delivered competitive performance in virtually every benchmark. The memory performance looked a little lower in our synthetic test, but when it came to real-world performance, it didn’t seem to be slowing things down. The gaming performance is right where you would want it to be, and delivered the high frame rates we’ve come to expect from the 8th Gen Intel CPUs and the GTX 1080 Ti.

Added Value

With high performance and quality audio delivered by the ALC1220 chipset, it’s unlikely you’ll be needed any additional sound processing hardware. There’s no built-in Wi-Fi, but with Intel GbE LAN Gaming, you’ll have no issues with fast networking performance here. Speaking of fast, a pair of Ultra-Fast M.2 mounts will help you drive those game loading times down to a minimum. There’s not a vast amount of RGB lighting on the motherboard, but it does offer some, as well as a few addressable headers to expand on the setup, as well as RGB Fusion software to make customisation a breeze.

Pros

• Dual M.2 mounts
• Good power delivery for overclocking
• Great efficiency
• ALC1220 Audio
• RGB Fusion
• Multi-GPU support
• Armoured PCIe slots
• Good connectivity
• Stylish design
• Great gaming performance
• Competitive price

Cons

• None

Neutral

• No onboard power controls or Debug LED
• Slight low memory performance, although it didn’t appeal to hurt real-world performance