Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Master Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

This is a pretty hardcore-looking motherboard, not that you can actually see much of the actual motherboard, as it’s all hiding under enough armour to be a lead in a Marvel movie. There’s a pair of massive heatsinks flanking the CPU, with their Fins-Array III design and NanoCarbon Coating, a huge 8mm heatpipe joining them, and 12 W/mK thermal pads.

The VRM configuration is pretty extreme, with a 20+1+2 Phases Digital Power Design, with 105A power stages, so pushing flagship CPUs to their absolute max and beyond should not be an issue here.

The CPU power connectors are the reinforced Solid Pin design with some additional armour and shielding around them.

The same design is found on the 24-pin connector.

The Master supports four DDR5 DIMMS with their Ultra Durable SMd Memory Armour design.

The bottom half of the motherboard has a huge Ultra Durable Armour and Thermal Guard III heatsink for the primary M.2, and there’s a massive M.2 Thermal Guard heatsink covering almost all of the lower half of the board.

With the armour out of the way, you can see there are five M.2 mounts absolutely packed in here, giving you an impressive amount of storage options. You can also see that all the PCI lanes are heavily armoured, especially the first one, which is PCIe 5.0.

If there wasn’t enough armour already, there’s more around the back, with the bigger heatsinks screwed through the motherboard into the backplate, rather than just hanging them off the PCB, which would likely cause it to buckle under its own wait.

The rear I/O is one of the most uniformly designed I’ve ever seen. There’s no USB 2.0, but you get four 3.2 ports (blue), seven USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, and three Type-C, two of which are the super-fast 20 Gbps.