Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Master
Masterful craftsmanship.
“It packs in a twelve phase PWM powered by dual eight pin connectors, which when combined with the cooling assembly, means there’s plenty of grunt on hand even if you’re into extreme overclocking. ”
Gigabyte has rejigged its branding. It’s a little difficult to know if a ‘Master’ is higher than an ‘Ultra’ in the product stack, for example. We have the Z390 Aorus Master on hand for review. Take one look at it though, and you know this is high end. It just oozes quality craftsmanship.
While many high-end boards these days focus on aesthetics ahead of function, Gigabyte has managed to do both. The heatsink is a work of art. It makes use of a traditional finned structure for maximum surface area, while retaining an eyecatching metal design with RGB elements; it really looks great, but does an exceptional cooling job too. It packs in a twelve phase PWM powered by dual eight pin connectors, which when combined with the cooling assembly, means there’s plenty of grunt on hand even if you’re into extreme overclocking.
There are three M.2 heatsinks and they look fantastic with their machined aluminium finish. Gigabyte is also known for its impressive audio implementations and the Aorus Master continues this trend with an onboard ESS Sabre DAC and dedicated USB ports. It also includes 802.11 AC Wave 2 functionality, delivering up to 1733 Mbps speed. This mostly makes up for the omission of a 2.5Gbps+ LAN connection that we feel is an oversight in this price range.
The I/O area has a good helping of ports including the AC Wi-Fi antennas. There’s four USB 3.1 ports including a single Type-C, two 3.0 ports and a four 2.0 ports. USB 2.0 ports are almost absent from the other boards, but for things like a mouse or keyboard, they are perfectly adequate. Interestingly there’s a power button on the rear and finally there’s single HDMI port, the audio ports, Intel Gigabit LAN port, and CMOS clear button.
The Aorus Master performed well in our benchmark test suite. As we expect, all the boards perform very closely to one another so there are no surprises.
The Gigabyte UEFI implementation is simple and easy to use, with all the important features well laid out. We generally prefer the ASRock and MSI BIOS layouts, but still there’s everything you need to extract the most from your CPU and memory. Overclocking with K series processors is as easy as ever and the Master had plenty left in the tank before our CPU ran into its temperature limits. It ran our memory at DDR4-3866 with zero effort.
Gigabyte has produced a wonderful looking board with some key differentiating features. The audio is top notch and it’ll be perfect for large M.2 arrays, but $569 is a good chunk of change. All the boards here in our roundup are mature and refined, so your choice may even come down to brand loyalty.