WINNER: Gigabyte Aorus GA-Z270X-Gaming 9

Intel’s

new 7th Gen Core CPU wasn’t anything to write to home about, but it did come with a new chipset, and the one gamers care most about is the Series 200 chipset. I reviewed over a dozen motherboards based on this chipset through the course of the year, and while the chipset itself only brought a few incremental improvements, there were so many damn impressive motherboards built around it. And taking the cake was the incredibly expensive GAZ270XGaming 9, from Aorus.

You may remember Aorus as a spinoff from Gigabyte, but Gigabyte has since used the brand to represent its premium gaming products, and a premium product this board most certainly is. Priced at a staggering $849 at launch, and still retailing for over $800, it’s one of the most featurepacked boards I’ve ever seen in my lengthy career.

It’s a huge slab of PCB, using the larger EATX form factor to ensure there’s room for quadGPUs, even though Nvidia no longer recommends anything more than twin cards in SLI. They’re all steelreinforced to handle the weight of so many cards, while another two PCIe single lane slots are included. Not that you’ll need them, as this board has basically everything you could want, builtin. I really liked the addition of eight extra PCIe lanes compared to other Z270 boards, as Gigabyte used a special PEX8747 to bump the total to 32 PCIe lanes versus 24 on other boards. This means you can run twin GPUs and multiple highspeed SSDs without having to worry about running out of PCIe lanes or USB ports; if you’ve bought a motherboard recently you’ll have seen the mindboggling table that shows which features suddenly stop working if you use too many SSDs, PCIe lanes or USB ports.

It also brought some of the best onboard audio I’ve ever had the pleasure of listening to my ears, using Creative’s quadcore Sound Core3D audio processor along with a BurrBrown DAC to deliver 120dB+ SNR audio. As usual with Gigabyte products, you can even swap out the amp to go for a different tone to the one included with the board. Full water cooling support is included in the main heatsink, along with highAmp fan connectors for demanding water pumps. In fact, all eight fan connectors can handle most water pumps, and are all able to detect whether your fan uses PWM or Voltage to vary their speed. Throw in nine temperature sensors, and you’ll be able to see exactly where things are getting a little hot. Storage speed demons will go nuts for the extreme options available. Twin U.2 connections are included alongside twin M.2 slots. Using an M.2 to U.2 convertor, it’s possible to run three U.2 drives in RAID 0 mode for a claimed sequential read speed of 3525MB/sec, making this a dream machine for users of massive files.

The list of features goes on and on, but to be frank, this is the best board I’ve ever tested. It’s also the most expensive.