Gigabyte Z690 AORUS Pro Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

Again, this is virtually entry-level by AORUS standards, but aesthetically, it’s still top-teir. This is a really nice looking motherboard that has plenty of heatsinks and armour but doesn’t go overboard. You can still some PCB here and there, but what it does have all looks purposeful. The design may be a little busy though, there’s a lot of tones here, with quite a lot of grey print on the PCB that would be better if left black, but it does match up with the rear shield design too.

The real focus should be the hardware though, and the VRM design looks great. It features 16 VCORE Phases with 90A Power Stage, 1 VCCGT Phase with 60A Power Stage for the iGPU, and 2 VCCAUX Phases with 70A Dr MOS for the PCIe and Memory controllers.

The CPU takes it power from an 8-pin header, however, there’s an additional 4-pin which can be used to improve stability with overclocking/boosts.

On the right, you’ll find a built-in power control, as well as the BIOS debug LED. There are four DDR5 DIMMS on the AORUS Pro, which supports XMP 3.0 for speeds up to 6200 MHz. However, you’ll be able to push way beyond that by overclocking too. The board also comes with DDT5 Unlocked Voltage modes.

The AORUS Pro features a single PCIe 5.0 lane, which features their new armoured design using a stainless steel mount that’s more secure to the board than ever, while also providing more shielding and better connectivity in general. However, you also get a pair of PCIe 3.0 slots too, should you need them.

There’s an M.2 heatsink above the top PCIe lane, but also further mounds under the larger heatsink below it. The AORUS Pro supports up to 4x M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 but it is backwards compatible with 3.0 drives too.

Additional storage can use the six SATA3 ports, albeit, their speeds won’t come close to the new Gen 4.0 drives!

AORUS put some decent audio hardware on this board too. It uses the latest ALC4080 chipset as well as the ALC1220 codec. all mounted on separate traces and shielded for improved performance.

There’s even a bank of premium WIAM Audio Capacitors. It’ll support Hi-Res audio and a 110dB SNR on the front jack and 120dB on the rear. The microphone is also improved from 92dB to 110dB vs the Z590 model.

The rear I/O is pretty decent too, not as many 3.2 Gen 2 ports as the more expensive models, but there’s a good variety, including a SuperSpeed USB 3.2 Gen2x2 TYPE-C that can deliver up to 20Gb/s transfer speeds. Networking gets a nice upgrade to 2.5 GbE LAN, but it’s the Intel WiFi 6 that excites me the most, as it allows for true gigabit wireless.