Gigabyte Z490I AORUS Ultra Motherboard Review

How Much Does it Cost?

The Gigabyte Z490I AORUS Ultra Motherboard is available now for just £264.95 here in the UK and $269.99 in the US. You often pay a premium for the mini-ITX range, as it’s more technically demanding to make and they don’t sell as many as their ATX counterparts. However, it’s ironically also one of the cheaper boards we’ve reviewed for this launch anyway.

Overview

While it might seem a little expensive for such a small motherboard, this little beast can seriously compete with its big brothers. It has a feature set and performance that more than justifies the price tag. I must admit though, I’m a big fan of mini-ITX (and mATX motherboards). Small form factor builds are still endlessly cool and it’s a shame there aren’t more boards on the market. But I digress because the Gigabyte Z490I AORUS Ultra is sure to be a success for AORUS.

Build Quality & Design

This motherboard is quite a bit more expensive than the previous Z390 mini-ITX models. However, it does look like AORUS have stepped up the design and features to justify it. The board looks and feels a lot more premium, and features much larger and nicer designed heatsinks. It actually blends into the rear I/O shield the double-height M.2 mount stack is really cool too and brings a nice heatsink on the top that really shows off the design. Plus, you get armoured headers, DIMM slots and a PCIe slot for that extra peace of mind; and it looks cool, obviously.

Performance

While pretty much all of the Z490 performed about the same, that was to be expected given they’re on the same chipset, CPU, RAM, etc. Even the overclocking performance was pretty much the same across the range as brands have stopped putting trash VRM configurations on most of their boards. Despite the size, AORUS crammed a Direct 8 Phase Digital Power Design, which can deliver that through 90A stages, and you get their Solid Pin headers and a 10-layer PCB. It seems then that even though it’s mini-ITX, you’ll still be able to enjoy overclocking on the flagship i9 CPUs, and that’s impressive. It’ll even support 64GB of DDR4 5000 MHz, not bad for a mini-ITX, I think you’ll agree.

Added Value

You get a lot for your money actually, with 4 SATA ports and 2 M.2 mounts in a double decker mount under that raised heatsink. It may only have a single PCIe 16x slot, but it’s armoured and Gen4 ready for Rocket Lake There’s USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type C, Gen 1 and plenty more USB ports beyond that. You also get fantastic audio thanks to the Realtek ALC1220-VB Codec, which even supports DTS:X Ultra.

Connectivity goes on too, with both HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, Intel 2.5GbE LAN and Intel WiFi 6 taking care of your networking needs.

Should I Buy One?

You’re not exactly spoilt for choice in the mini-ITX market, and we’ve only got two in for review for this launch. However, at this price, this level of features, amazing build quality and very competitive performance, you’re bound to love the Gigabyte Z490I AORUS Ultra!