Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 9

Overpriced and underdelivering

PRICE $ 795 www.gigabyte.com.au

We’ve become quite accustomed to Gigabyte charging rather high prices for its boards, but when you compare it to what else is on the market, it’s really hard to justify those extra $250. So what does $800 of motherboard buy you?

The first thing you’ll notice about this board is that it’s much heavier than the others. Whether that’s due to extra PCB layers, or better heatsinks, or metal backplate is hard to figure out. You also get the best automatic overclock of the lot, with this board hitting 4.6GHz using its auto-tune feature. This basically tests the board at a given frequency, then repeats the process until it hits its max. Not only that, it was rock solid at 4.6GHz, not dropping down to 4.3GHz like the other boards.

There’s also a huge amount of PCIe x16 lanes, with a total of five steelreinforced lanes. On the flipside, this means there are no other smaller PCIe lanes; thankfully any PCIe device, be it x4 or x8, will work in a x16 lane. There’s also three M.2 slots, each of which includes a nice meaty heatsink. Just eight SATA 3 ports are included, two less than more affordable boards.

Disco fans will appreciate the ‘RGB fusion’ support to hook up all your whiz bang light devices, and this board is literally covered in light zones, with nearly every section of the board having its own lighting zone. As expected at this price, twin Ethernet is included thanks to a single Intel Ethernet connector along with a Rivet Networks Killer E2500 LAN as well as Killer’s 802.11ac solution. We’re surprised to see the absence of Thunderbolt 3 given how common it is on other high-end Gigabyte boards, but there is a header if you want to fork out for this optional extra.

This board is an overclocker’s delight, with onboard buttons for Eco, OC, reset and power buttons. Despite the use of the Creative SoundBlaster 720° branding on the board, it actually uses the exact same ALC1220 codec as the other boards on the market, and yet again beefed up with extras to get the best possible sound. Gigabyte claims a 127dB SNR, and also includes its user-replaceable AMP-UP upgradeable amplifier.

A nice touch is the already-installed I/O plate, which covers the four USB 3.1 Type, one USB 3.1 Type C and four USB 3.0 ports. It’s also lit up, so when you go digging around behind your board, you can actually see what each port does.

When it came to put it through its paces, the board performed around the

you also get the best automatic overclock of the lot, hitting 4.6GHz using its autotune feature

middle of the pack – not exactly enticing news when you’re spending almost $800 on your board. There’s also not that many features that set this aside from the rest, apart from the massive amount of lighting zones. Oh, did we mention we couldn’t get Intel’s Turbo Boost Max 3.0 technology to work with this board.

As such, there’s simply no justifying such a sky-rocketing price. Gigabyte needs to deliver a hell of a lot more if it’s going to charge 40% more than the competition. BENNETT RING