Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro
SCORE PRICE £140 (£168 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/298gig
The Gigabyte is the most expensive board in this shootout, and it serves up impressive aesthetics to justify the cost. The heatsinks and rear I/O cover are designed using eyecatching angles, and RGB LEDs are installed in the heatsinks, along the audio circuitry and even between the memory slots.
The design is backed up by practicality. You get three PCIe x16 slots, with two capable of handling dual-graphics from AMD and Nvidia. It’s the only board here with steel around its PCI and memory slots, and it has support for 128GB of memory. Both M.2 connectors have heatsinks – an unusual extravagance at this price. The Gigabyte serves up six fan connectors and four lighting headers, which is more than any other board here. It also offers more USB connectivity, with three more USB headers and a USB-C 3.1 header for front panels.
But there are minor omissions. You don’t get DisplayPort or PS/2 on the rear, and there isn’t any wireless. The Gigabit Ethernet and audio chipsets aren’t special, either.
This mild disappointment was more than countered by its turn of pace. Its video-editing and multitasking scores of 267 and 305 are the best here, and its overall score of 270 tops the results table. Those scores were bolstered by class-leading performance in the Cinebench and Geekbench tests. The Gigabyte didn’t only excel in applications – its 3D Mark Fire Strike result of 17,847 is the best here, and it scored a solid 101fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and a table-topping 152fps in Middleearth: Shadow of Mordor. And while the Gigabyte’s storage and memory results were ordinary, they were never slow.
In most benchmarks the Gigabyte is quicker than anything else here, and the Aorus serves up features, connectivity and design that’s almost always better than its big rival from ASRock. Not everyone will need the Gigabyte’s speeds or features, so there’s money to be saved by looking elsewhere. But, if you need the best performance and the broadest range of features, the Gigabyte is worth every penny.
KEY SPECS 4 x 4,266MHz DDR4, max 128GB 3 x PCIe x16, 3 x PCIe x1 5 x USB 3.1, USB-C 3.1, 4 x USB 2, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, optical S/PDIF, 5 x audio 2 x M.2, 6 x SATA 3 3yr RTB warranty