Gigabyte Z790 AORUS MASTER X DDR5 E-ATX Motherboard Review

How Much Does It Cost?

The Gigabyte Intel Z790 AORUS MASTER X DDR5 PCIe 5.0 E-ATX Motherboard isn’t cheap, coming in at £609.98 at the time of writing. That is a lot, but not exactly uncommon for these high-end boards either. Why is it so much? Well, the massive amount of metals on the board certainly adds to the cost, with some significant heatsinks and a full backplate cooling all major components. Then there’s the extensive connectivity, five M.2 slots, armour on all hardware slots, and a plethora of I/O that don’t come free or cheap. If you’re not going to use nearly all of that, it would be wise to invest in a model further down the Aorus range.

Overview

It’s hard not to love what Gigabyte has done here, albeit, it’s pretty much unheard of for an AORUS motherboard not to leave a good impression. For your typical gaming PC, it’s total overkill, but for extreme systems and content creators, it certainly has a lot to offer.

The VRM and the heatsinks used to cool them are some of the best I’ve ever tested. They ran cool enough to safely touch even after an hour of 100% CPU load in Prime95. You can max your CPU all day long rendering video and stability just isn’t going to be an issue, which is great.

Speaking of video rendering, the rear I/O is pretty extreme on this motherboard, offering three Type-C connections with super fast transfer speeds that are ideal for those loading and unloading massive data sets. We use a lot of external M.2 drives to capture video in 12K, so having a motherboard that can keep up with moving such big files is a real-time saver.

Furthermore, there’s no Gigabit ethernet here, this board comes out swinging with 10Gbps LAN as standard, and the latest WiFi 7. Moving files around our network to the RAID NVMe NAS over 10GbE and getting the most from multi-gig broadband takes some serious hardware, but the Master X is certainly not going to be the weakest link in that chain.

Should I Buy One?

When it comes to real-world performance, the Aorus Master X certainly holds its own. In gaming, rendering, office tasks, or anything else really, it set some competitive benchmarks. Sure, it’s not much faster than some less expensive boards, however, keep in mind that it has extremely robust build quality, much higher storage and connectivity capabilities, and heavy-duty VRM and cooling solutions that mean that while you can get similar performance for less money, the Aorus Master X will deliver that performance 24/7 even under sustained high-loads, while lesser boards will overheat and throttle your hardware.