Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Elite AX Motherboard Review

How Much Does It Cost?

Not only does this motherboard have an MSRP of over £300, but actually between the time of starting the review, where I was seeing it listed for £330, to the time I’m writing this section about pricing, I’ve actually found it on Amazon for £303.48 with a 17% discount, bringing it to just £251.01. That’s truly exceptional value, and since it delivered such impressive performance I say buy one, and buy one now! Because if you don’t, someone else will… maybe even myself, this is a great deal.

Overview

Gigabyte is making my job easy today, as I’d say overall, this is one of the best Z790 motherboards I’ve tested to date. Sure, some benchmarks have other boards that perform a little bit better, some motherboards have slightly larger VRM, or slightly better cooling, but honestly, overall I think the Aorus Elite AX can take them all to school when it comes to delivering good performance in all the benchmarks on average, but more so when you consider two things, the performance closely matches or beats that of the Gigabyte Aorus Master, which costs £568, and this motherboard costs around £250.

If you’re a PC gamer, this is all the motherboard you need and then some. It has plenty of USB connectivity, it has fast 2.5 GbE LAN and superbly fast WiFi 6E, it has great on-board audio, the latest PCIe 5.0 and PCI 4.0 support, and even room for four M.2 drives, so you can create a pretty extreme system without any issues here.

So why would you spend more than double on the Master? The Master is meant for extremely demanding I/O scenarios, if you need a plethora of external storage and networking support, and you’re going to be rendering high-resolution assets 24/7, the Master is worth every penny. If you’re hooking up a keyboard and mouse and want to slay your mates in Apex while enjoying blisteringly fast FPS, the Elite AX is the smart choice.

Not to sell it short though, if you do use this motherboard for rendering video, or any heavy-duty connectivity and calculation-type stuff, it’s hardly lacking. It can push the latest Intel CPUs hard, and its got heatsinks and hardware in all the right places to ensure it can do it for hours on end without any stability issues.

Should I Buy One?

Yes, this is by far one of the best performance and value options for Z790 right now. With support for the latest and greatest hardware, and the fact that it not only looks fantastic but also delivered impressive performance across the board, the Gigabyte Z790 Elite AX gets top marks all round from me.