Gigabyte Z790 AORUS MASTER X DDR5 E-ATX Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

This is a pretty amazing-looking motherboard, with a mixture of reflective and matte finishes that make it both stand out aesthetically, while also being a little understated, as most of the hardware is hiding under thick armour.

The armour is aesthetically pleasing, but it’s 100% practical too. Take these enormous VRM heatsinks, with a Nanocarbon coating, and a hefty heatpipe linking the two, this is going to ensure you can run the CPU hard for hours on end without overheating the board, or at least, that’s what it should do, we’ll test that shortly. The CPU headers, the memory, and even the rear I/O are all reinforced and armoured too.

I love the matte black finish too, it’s meant to help with cooling too, but it just looks cool.

The lower half of the board features one massive heatsink, below which you’ll find the motherboard chipset, as well as a number of M.2 drive bays. All three of the PCIe slots are armoured, however, there’s additional reinforcement on the top slot too. The whole thing is held in place by two pins on the left and a single quick release on the right for easy access.

These massive heatsinks all screw through the motherboard, into a thick backplate, which provides additional strength, but also even more surface area for cooling the PCB.

There’s armour on the DDR5 slots, not that I think it’s particularly needed, but it does look good and prevents the board from flexing. There’s armour on the 24-pin too, and even a BIOS debug LED, which can help with solving boot issues.

While the board does have plenty of M.2, there are only four SATA ports, however, in 2023 and beyond, I suspect that’s plenty.

There’s a huge M.2 heatsink on the primary M.2 slot, with this slot supporting Gen 5 M.2 drives, while the other four support Gen 4 drives.

The rear I/O is packed, offering up a huge number of USB ports, with 7 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (red), USB 3.2 Gen 1 (blue), as well as three type-c ports, offering up DisplayPort support, 10GB/s and 20Gb/s connectivity. There’s both 10 Gbps Marvell AQtion AQC113C LAN and the latest WiFi 7 too, for ultra-fast networking.

With the heatsinks removed, you can see all five M.2 slots, which dominate the lower half of the motherboard.

The VRM is certainly robust, with a Digital Direction 20+1+2 phase solution, which certainly explains the need for such a massive VRM heatsink.

The heatsinks feature a more robust 12 W/mk thermal pad, with a blue pad on the heat pipes and darker black pads on the aluminium heatsink.