Z790 Aorus Pro X Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

From the moment you take it out of the box, it’s easy to tell this is a great motherboard, as it’s absolutely crammed with huge heatsinks and reinforcement on all of the major components. That much at least tells us it’s going to be both durable and plenty capable of keeping our hardware running as cool as possible to reach its performance potential. Plus, it looks good too, and aesthetics are a big part of PC building these days!

The CPU is flanked by three pretty significantly sized heatsinks, with one above and to the left covering the powerful VRM configuration. Each of these large heatsinks is robust, milled from a single piece of aluminium and has four times the surface area of previous models.

On the lower half of the motherboard, you’ve got a heck of a lot of metal here too, with a towering heatsink on the primary M.2 slot, and a single giant heatsink on the lower half-covering additional M.2 slots, as well as the main chipset. It’s easy to open too, with a single screw on the left, and two pegs on the left holding it in place.

At the top of the motherboard, there are two reinforced 8-pin CPU connectors.

The motherboard uses all premium quality chokes and capacitors throughout its design.

There are four DIMM slots, supporting DDR5 with support for 8266 MT/s (OC), XMP Booster, DDR5 Auto Booster, and a wave of quality features such as shielded memory routing, isolated traces, and 8-layer PCB, and back drilling technology, so it’s all pretty rigid.

The motherboard supports Front USB 20 Gb/s, THunderbolt Add-in, and Sensor Panel Link.

There are four SATA 6 GB/s ports located near the bottom.

In addition to the primary PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, there are two more x16 slots, one at PCIe 4.0 and the other at PCIe 3.0.

This motherboard comes with the ever-popular Realtek ALC1220-VB Codec, with support for up to 7.1 audio and some really nice quality audio capacitors.

Around the back, the white PCB is largely grey on the back, which looks pretty funky, even if you’ll rarely see this side of it.

The rear I/O is decent too, with plenty of USB ports, including a Type-C 20 Gb/s, 5GbE LAN, and the latest WiFi 7 technology.

With the board stripped down, you can see that white/cream-coloured PCB in all its glory, and aside from the audio capacitors, it sticks pretty strictly to a monochrome theme.

The VRM consists of a Digital Twin design with 18+1+2 phases and the CPU is actually run in parallel with a 9+9 phases parallel power design.

The heatsinks cover a lot of this motherboard, but with them removed you can see the M.2 slot at the top, and three more below it, with four more below that, as well as a small card connected to power the WiFi 7 connectivity.