GIGABYTE Z390 AORUS MASTER

September 10, 2020April 3, 2020 by Stephen

Now I can’t really say that I was impressed with the performance of either the Realtek ALC1220-VB audio card (still prefer the Creative Sound Blaster Recon3D model used in the Z390 Dark) or the cFosSpeed internet enhancements used with the Intel I219-V 1 Gigabit LAN (virtually no difference with network performance measurements taken with the other two Z390 boards) but it goes without saying that not everything is meant to stand out (at least nowhere near what manufacturers make them out to be).

GIGABYTE Z390 AORUS MASTER

September 13, 2020March 21, 2019 by Stephen

Nonetheless, it is clear that each motherboard company is piling on the R&D dollars, as well as the design dollars, to ensure that it can convince users to part with some hard earned money in their next build. GIGABYTE’s latest attempt is the Z390 Aorus Master, a motherboard that on paper sets its sights on features, aesthetics, and capability.

GIGABYTE Z390 AORUS MASTER

September 14, 2020February 27, 2019 by Stephen

There is plenty of good stuff to discuss about the Z390 Aorus Master so let’s start with the VRMs as power delivery hardware is a major focus for Gigabyte with their Z390 motherboards. Gigabyte has gone out of their way to spell out the number of power phases, the makes and models of the various chips and also their current ratings so we are crystal clear there are 12x 60A phases using a doubling scheme.

GIGABYTE Z390 AORUS MASTER

September 21, 2020November 9, 2018 by Stephen

Z390 Master excels in cooling design, with a solid, L-shaped heatsink that wraps around the 12-phase digital VRMs. A solid aluminium block is augmented by stacked fins, and Aorus has thick thermal interface material between it and the VRMs for direct-touch cooling. Measuring 25mm high and screwed in properly on the rear side, this is about as good as motherboard cooling gets.

GIGABYTE Z390 AORUS MASTER

September 19, 2020October 26, 2018 by Stephen

However, Gigabyte probably edges both Asus and MSI with their similarly-priced boards in terms of aesthetics as the Z390 Aorus Master looks awesome in the flesh and is the only one out of the MSI MEG Z390 Ace and Asus ROG Maximus XI Hero to have three heatisnk-equipped M.2 ports.

GIGABYTE Z390 AORUS MASTER

September 29, 2020October 22, 2018 by Stephen

As many people have concluded, motherboard selection for your 9900K will determine how high you will be able to comfortably overclock your CPU, and that is because these new CPUs can take eight cores over 5.0GHz on high-end ambient level cooling.

GIGABYTE Z390 AORUS MASTER

September 24, 2020October 22, 2018 by Stephen

As we mentioned earlier, the Z390 AORUS Master can support both the 8th gen and 9th gen CPU without any issue. Just in case if you wonder, we’ve updated the BIOS from version F4 to F5 for our test. While it’s still not as good as what we hope it would be, it does look a lot better than before.

GIGABYTE Z390 AORUS MASTER

September 18, 2020October 19, 2018 by Stephen

Gigabyte’s Z390 Aorus Master replaces its previous-generation Z370 Aorus Gaming 7 in the high-end mainstream platform market, with an array of new features that closely match those of the older board. Buyers get a product designed to support eight-core processors, where the older model supported six.

GIGABYTE Z390 AORUS MASTER

September 23, 2020October 19, 2018 by Stephen

The Master from Aorus is easily one of their best-equipped motherboards to date, short of their extreme X299 motherboards. It features support for both 8th and 9th Gen CPUs, although that’s true of all Z390 motherboards. With 12 phases RI Digital VRM and PowIRstage, as well as 2 x 8 Pin CPU connectors, which should allow us to drive the big power levels the new i9 demands.