Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming 5 Wi-Fi
What a difference a number can make.
It’s not easy buying a motherboard at the best of the times, what with them all promising almost identical features and claiming to all have the same benefits over each other. Things get even harder when you’re trying to select between two ‘ boards made by the same company, in the same range, such as this one, which goes up against the X470 Aorus Gaming 7 Wi-Fi (right).
The obvious difference here is the price. At $100 cheaper than the Gaming 7, this is around a third cheaper than its big brother. So we can immediately assume that the hedge trimmers have been taken to this ‘ board. Looking at the specs on paper doesn’t reveal too much of a difference, though. There’s the same X470 chipset, three PCIe x16 physical lanes and twin PCIe x1 lanes. There’s also two M.2 slots, though this time around, only one comes with a heavy-duty heatsink. This slight trim in cooling leads us to the cooling around the CPU power phases; in the case of this ‘ board, it’s far more simplified than the 7. There’s still a heatpipe, but it lacks the chunky aluminium fins that give the Gaming 7 such superior cooling. The physicality of the ‘ board isn’t as imposing either. There’s no backplate behind the CPU to provide superior rigidity, while only two of the three x16 lanes have steel reinforcement. LED lovers will also find that around half of the light zones of the Gaming 7 are now gone, with no lighting around the memory slots or right light panel.
This is in part because the Gaming 5 has an inferior power system, utilising an 11 phase (8+3) system compared to its big brother’s 12-phase system. If you’re not pushing your system, this won’t make much of a difference, but it’s a biggie for overclockers. Officially supported memory speeds have also been slightly cut, dropping from 3,600MHz to 3,200MHz, though in reality, this is really only a feature that benchmarkers will care about.
The I/O options have also been trimmed back, with a total of 10 USB ports but fewer of these are of the faster USB 3 standard, with four being USB 2.0. Aorus has seen fit to still include its power-tuning USB DACUP 2 ports, as well as a single Type-C port. There’s no integrated I/O shield this time around, which isn’t a biggie, especially when you consider this ‘ board still includes integrated 802.11ac Wi-Fi.
Despite these differences, at stock speeds, this board is basically identical in performance to the Gaming 7. It’s the same story with the other ‘ boards; when you’re all using the same base chipset, you’re all going to perform nearly identically at default settings. It’s like building a bunch of houses from the same bricks and mortar, but painting them differently — they’ll all still weather the storm equally well. As such, the Gaming 5 is the perfect option for those who don’t need the advanced overclocking features of the Gaming 7, and puts it neck and neck with the ASRock ‘ board, which has a slight edge in SATA connectivity.