Gigabyte Z790 Aero G Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

The first impressions are good, with a design that features some large heatsinks above and to the left of the CPU, with a large M.2 heatsink below the CPU, and a truly enormous one below that, which seems to be a single heatsink for the chipset and four of the M.2 slots, but given the freaking size of it, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.

The aesthetics of the heatsinks are nice, but there’s a pretty serious amount of metal here with thick fins stacked high over the VRM and with quite a bit of overhang at the top and bottom to further increase the overall surface area. I suspect this could conflict with some larger CPU air coolers that have towers that start low and wide, but the trade-off is that VRM temperatures should be pretty fantastic.

With the heatsinks removed, we can see there are two densely packed banks of capacitors, chokes and MOSFETs, arranged to give the motherboard a 16+1+2 (8 phases in parallel) design, that should be more than anyone but extremely enthusiastic overclockers will ever need.

There is a single 8-pin CPU power connector, but also an optional 4-pin for added voltage stability on the more power-hungry CPUs.

The heatsinks are serious business though, even if they look like a novelty bottle opener from some angles, there is a lot of metal and a lot of surface area here to ensure the primary M.2 is kept free from thermal throttling. The primary slot supports a PCIe 5.0 M.2, and comes with an EZ-Latch mount so you don’t have to muck about with tiny screws.

It does look cool, and well, it should keep things cool too.

The top PCIe mount is fully armoured and PCIe 5.0 x16 while the bottom two are PCIe 4.0 x4, but offer full-length mounts. The huge heatsink looks like an aluminium pencil case, it’s just a big slab of aluminium, but should provide plenty of heat dissipation for the drive mounts that reside under it.

There are four PCIe Gen 4 M.2 mounts under it with the first running from the CPU and then three running from the chipset; this gives you a total of five M.2 mounts when you include the one PCIe 5.0 mount.

The rear I/O is great, with a few USB 3.2 Gen 2 (red), as well as a USB Type-C 10G that also supports DisplayPort Type-C, and then a 20Gbps port Type-C below that. Of course, there’s also 2.5 Gbps LAN and WiFi 6E, although both are not pretty much standard on this chipset. There are no USB 40 Gbps which is a shame, but I do suppose few people would actually use that standard yet.