Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Master
Flagship features without the flagship pricing.
Gigabyte’s Aorus Master boards usually impress us. They’re unmistakably high-end boards, but they sit in a price range that hits a good balance of pricing and premium features without resorting the extreme cost that burdens boards that include the kitchen sink.
If you’re planning to run an overclocked 11900K, you need a board with a very strong VRM, and the Aorus delivers. With its 18 phase 90A design fed by dual 8-pin power connectors, it’s about as good as it gets. We love the Aorus finned heatsink design that prioritises function over form. The solid metal chunks on many boards may look good, but efficient cooling relies on surface area and with the way Rocket Lake can punish the VRM, Gigabyte’s choice is the smart one. With Adaptive Boost on, the highest VRM temperature we saw was just 58 degrees, that’s the best result of the test.
The board features a subtle design. Where once Aorus turned the RGB up to 11, the Z590 Master features just a couple of touches of RGB around the chipset heatsink and rear I/O. You get three M.2 slots all with heatsinks plus the now common six SATA ports. The board includes three PCIe 16x slots, but somewhat unusually, no 1x slots. This shouldn’t affect a lot of users but after you use the topmost one for a GPU, you’re down to two slots, so take note if you use several expansion cards.
The Master’s rear I/O includes almost everything you’d ever want with ten USB ports including a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type- C port. Would a couple more be nice at this price point? That’s a real nitpick. You get Wi-Fi 6E and somewhat surprisingly at this price, Aquantia 10Gb LAN. Usually that’s one of those features that’s exclusive to the uber expensive flagship boards. Users of SSD based NAS rejoice!
Motherboard audio is sometimes neglected. Not so in the case of the Z590 Aorus Master. It features the Realtek ALC1220-VB code with an ESS ES9118 Sabre DAC with WIMA and Nichicon capacitors. You’ll have to drop more than a few dollars to get a better audio solution.
Our 11900K sample is genuinely cooling limited and 5.2Ghz is the best we’ve been able to get out of it even with an AVX offset. The Aorus easily reproduced this result with
DDR4-3600 at C14 with the memory running in 1:1 mode. Performance wise the boards are all mostly within a fraction of each other, however the Gigabyte really impressed us with its SSD performance, easily leading the other boards. In fact, it’s the first board that beat our AMD system’s results with a fast Samsung 980 Pro. Gigabyte clearly spent time getting its PCIe 4.0 performance up to scratch.
We really like the Z590 Aorus Master. It’s got a mega VRM, 10G Lan and Wi-Fi 6E and good connectivity. Add to that class leading SSD performance and a decent price and it deserves a spot on your shortlist of upper mid-range contenders. We’d like to see a PCIe 1x slot or two but at this price we can hardly complain. The likes of the Asrock Taichi, MSI Ace and Asus Hero have a difficult time matching the value on offer from the Z590 Aorus Master.