Gigabyte Z690 AORUS Master Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

For those wanting a hardcore looking motherboard for this build, this is certainly going to fit the bill. The black PCB with black hardware looks fantastic, with just a few off-white highlights for the graphics and text to break up the design a little. However, style aside, all this armour is providing a heavy-duty amount of cooling to all the major components.

Here you’ll find one of the best VRM heatsinks on the market, as it uses their Fins-Array III design, which is more in-line with a large CPU cooler, rather than the more chunky VRM we often see. However, they’re massive, and the one on the left of the socket is vast. Gigabyte says the surface area is 700% larger than the usual block design.

From overclocking to getting the best from Turbo Boost, this VRM design should make easy work of anything you throw at it. You get 19 VCORE Phases with a 105A Power Stage for the CPU, 1 VCCGT Phase at 60A for the iGPU, and 2 VCAUX Phases with 70A DrMOS for the PCIe and memory controller.

CPU power comes from two 8-pin headers, each using a more robust design with some external armour, and reaping the benefits of a thicker PCB with larger copper traces.

The motherboard is well equipped for cooling, with support for 10 PWM/DC fans, 2 external sensor headers, and a noise detection cable. There’s also the usual array of RGB and dRGB connectors, as you would expect these days.

There are four DDR5 DIMMs on the board, all armoured with their “Ultra Durable DDR5 Armor”. These deliver up to 6400 MHz dual-channel memory, with support for the latest XMP 3.0 profiles.

If you’re excited by fast storage, you’ll be happy to find 5x M.2 Connectors NVMe PCIe 4.0/3.0 x4, all with M.2 Thermal Guard III or the enlarged heatsinks on the lower part of the motherboard.

There are six SATA ports too, should you have any older SSDs or HDDs.

This board features impressive audio hardware too, thanks to the ESS SABRE HiFi 9118 DAC, as well as the ALC1220-VB chipset, and WiMA Capacitors; there’s certainly little need for a soundcard with this beast!

On the rear of the motherboard, you’ll find it’s pretty much all armour. Not only does this increase the cooling of the board, but also prevents all that heavy metal on the front from snapping the PCB in half.

The rear I/O shield is pre-installed, making for an easy installation. There are 11 USB ports, all running the latest USB 3.2 Gen 2 speeds, with the exception of the Type-C ports, which are even faster Gen 2×2 20Gbps ports. WiFi 6 is built-in, and backed up by the class-leading Aquantia 10GbE LAN.