Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Master Motherboard Review

How Much Does It Cost?

The Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Master is available now from most major retailers, with it currently on Amazon for £568.61. That is, I know, a heck of a lot of money. However, it’s clear that when it comes to cooling, power delivery, and connectivity, you’re getting a lot in return for your investment. However, I would suggest that if you don’t actually intend to use all the available connectivity properly, like the 20 Gb/s USB Type-C, and 10GbE LAN, to name but a few, then this is overkill and the faster Aorus Elite AX gaming motherboard that’s far cheaper, is the smarter choice.

Overview

This motherboard calls itself the Master, and in many, but not all regards, that’s certainly true. It’s not the fastest motherboard, actually, these extremely heavily I/O-equipped boards rarely are, as there’s some additional hardware overhead for all that connectivity. But of course, if you’re using a NAS, DAS, external NVMe storage, huge RAID arrays of M.2 Gen4 drives, and workstation GPUs, then yes, the Master is going to give you a lot more back than some of the more affordable gaming motherboards.

It’s certainly not slow though, and side by side, it’s extremely competitive with all the other fast Z790 motherboards, with great M.2 performance, and fantastic DDR5 support, and really, you’ve nothing to be concerned about here. However, what really stands out about this motherboard is the cooling and power consumption. How it’s able to deliver performance on par or better than other Z790 motherboards, while using significantly less power and producing significantly less heat, or at least, producing as much heat but dealing with the cooling better, is pretty damn impressive.

When it comes to building a seriously high-end workstation, stability is king, and the lower power consumption and temperatures are clearly going to be a huge advantage. If you’re rendering a scene and you have your GPU and CPU sitting at 100% load for many hours or even for days, then it’s going to give you peace of mind and limit any chances of performance throttling too.

Should I Buy One?

This motherboard is likely too much for some people, in terms of price and the overall connectivity it offers, there just aren’t many users out there that are going to take full advantage of it. Sure, I think some deep-pocketed gamers will buy it for bragging rights, as the cooling performance is pretty nice to have, but it’s clear you can get similar gaming and daily performance for less than half the money. However, if you want the best of the best, the investment clearly has its benefits.