Gigabyte Aorus Master X570
Power over presentation.
The X570 Aorus Master isn’t much to look at. Gigabyte has never been known for overly flashy motherboards, but the Aorus Master feels like it’s reached a new level of function over form. With an almost brutalist black and gray design and barely any lighting – just a few LEDs around the rear I/O – this isn’t a mobo for those trying to make their build look as bright and colorful as possible. Those LEDs are addressable, yes, but they’re distinctly underwhelming in action.
Thankfully, appearance isn’t an indicator of quality. The Aorus Master might look dull, but it functions well. Looking at the raw numbers, it pretty comfortably outperforms previous-generation X470 motherboards when equipped with a new 3000-series Ryzen CPU. The performance differences are small but notable, with the exception of SSD transfer speeds. With the staple PCIe 4.0 support that the X570 generation introduced, the Aorus
Master has blisteringly fast M.2 transfer speeds, breaking 5,000MB/s in our tests. It’s still immensely satisfying to see, even if it’s a niche feature that has the potential to be bottlenecked by other parts of any given system.
Memory latency and processor-heavy tasks come out more or less the same as previous-generation boards, albeit with the Master coming out just ahead. The board doesn’t allow for much overclocking potential, but that’s more of a problem with the new Ryzen processors that has yet to be resolved by AMD. Even so, it’s not hard to get our Ryzen 9 3900X running at a stable 4.2GHz, though sadly the Master needs the same voltage to achieve that as the X470 board we tested.
The performance comes at a cost, however. The Aorus Master guzzles power under load, demanding far more than the X470 board – disappointing when examined alongside the modest performance gains. Idle wattage isn’t much higher, but if you like to overclock or have your system running demanding software for hours on end, this might not be the right motherboard for you. The reason for this increased power draw isn’t clear; the dedicated fan and numerous temperature sensors could be the cause, although other X570 boards we’ve seen haven’t had this problem.
In terms of physical design elements, rather than benchmarking performance, the Master starts to look a bit more appealing. It comes with three of those super-speedy NVMe Gen4 ports for M.2 SSDs, each with its own removable heat spreader.
In terms of connectivity, this board has all the usual trimmings. Wi-Fi support on the rear I/O was a welcome surprise (Gigabyte tends to stick “Wi-Fi” in the name of boards with their own antenna ports), and there’s support for USB-C ports from the front I/O, joined by a USB-C port on the rear I/O. This rear port supports fast-charge for mobile devices, too; a minor addition for some, but a lifesaver for others. The board also has the increasingly common two-digit calculator-style display, handing you a hopefully-helpful error code in the event of a failure to boot. The tiny motherboard fan and clever thermal design do good work as well.
There’s nothing important you’d miss if you threw this board into a generic system build. It’s not exciting, but it is pretty good. Unless you’re planning on upgrading your CPU and storage, it’s an unnecessary replacement for an X470 or even X370 board, but if you’re looking to build an entirely new system, you could definitely do worse than the Aorus Master.