Gigabyte Z490 AORUS XTREME Motherboard Review

How Much Does it Cost?

As one of the flagship motherboards for the Z490 chipset, it’s got a hefty price tag to go with its hefty set of features. Unfortunately, stock isn’t showing on Amazon prior to the review going live, but it does launch today. You can check for up to date stock in the UK here and in the US here.

What I do know is that you’ll be shopping in the region of £750/$800, putting it about on par, perhaps a little more expensive, than the flagships from MSI, ASRock, ASUS, etc.

Overview

I loved the previous flagship motherboards from AORUS, they’re some of my all time favourites when it comes to their design and features. At this price point, these boards have to be absolutely flawless and capable of just about everything, and AORUS has certainly achieved that here. Sure, it’s complete overkill for your typical gaming build, but it’s designed for much more than that. Sure, you can use these boards with an i3, but really, that’s never going to happen.

Build Quality & Design

Obviously, being an E-ATX motherboard it’s already pretty massive. However, damn near every inch of it is covered with a thick metal plate or two, or three, and a rack of fins, and then there’s even a huge armoured backplate. It’s heavy, XTREMELY heavy. However, the design is so much cleaner than you might expect. It’s almost minimal as everything is a little bit hidden. There’s a cool geometric puzzle of premium materials that spans the whole motherboard, interlaced with some chrome and RGB to really make it stand out from the crowd.

There’s a plethora of SATA ports, USB headers etc, and most of this is mounted at 90-degree on the side of the motherboard for easy cable routing. It looks superb!

Performance

Pretty much every motherboard in the Z490 range that we’ve tested performed broadly the same, even these big flagships didn’t really always top the charts. If we benchmarked them all again on any other day, I suspect most of them would trade places too.

It’s exceptionally well armoured and cooled though, and this is great news for the extreme overclockers out there. We’ve no doubt this motherboard will be the focus for setting a few world records. For liquid cooling and even LN2 overclocking, it’s more than got the power delivery hardware to match anything you throw at it.

Added Value

The value of this motherboard comes from the class-leading connectivity. There are three PCIe x16 slots and 3 M.2 mounts, and they’re all Gen4 ready (when Rocket Lake launches). There’s a wide array of USB 3.2 ports, including Gen1 and Gen2. However, there’s also the (very) expensive addition of dual Thunderbolt 3 ports, giving us 40 Gbps transfer speeds. Other pricey additions as the Aquantia 10GbE and Intel 2.5G AND Intel WiFi 6 AX201 WiFi.

You even get flagship audio, thanks to the ESS Sabre HiFi with DTS:X Ultra support and an ESS USB DAC for hooking up analog audio sources. Basically you pay a lot, but you get what you pay for.

Should I Buy One?

It’s one of the finest motherboards the world has ever seen, and it’s unlikely many of you will need it or even want to pay the retail price for it. The addition of Thunderbolt 3 ports and Aquantia add an enormous premium to the price though and if you don’t require those, maybe look one or two models down the range and save some cash. However, if you want the best of the best, then the XTREME is just a stunning piece of hardware engineering.