Gigabyte Z390 AORUS ULTRA Gaming Motherboard review

Gigabyte Z390 AORUS ULTRA Gaming Motherboard review

Gigabyte Z390 AORUS ULTRA Gaming Motherboard review

FOR
Great CPU overclocking
Good voltage regulator cooling and feature set
Comprehensive software suite

AGAINST
Mediocre memory overclocking
Price is a bit high.

Specifications

Socket	LGA 1151
Chipset	Intel Z390
Form Factor	ATX
Voltage Regulator	14 Phases
Video Ports	HDMI 1.4
USB Ports	10Gbps: (1) Type-C, (3) Type A 5Gb/s: (2) Type A; (4) USB 2.0
Network Jacks	Gigabit Ethernet, (2) Wi-Fi Antenna
Audio Jacks	(5) Analog, (1) Digital Out
Legacy Ports/Jacks	✗
Other Ports/Jack	Power, CLR_CMOS Buttons
PCIe x16	*(3) v3.0 ( x16/x0/x4, x8/x8/x4, x8/x8/x2) (Two lanes shared w/3rd M.2)*
PCIe x8	✗
PCIe x4	✗
PCIe x1	(3) v3.0
CrossFire/SLI	3x / 2x
DIMM slots	(4) DDR4
M.2 slots	*(2) PCIe 3.0 x4^ / SATA, (1) PCIe 3.0 x4 (Excludes ports 1, ^4-5)*
U.2 Ports	✗
SATA Ports	(6) 6Gb/s (M.2-1 takes pts 4-5, SATA M.2-2 pt 1)
USB Headers	(1) 10Gb/s Type-C, (1) v3.0, (2) v2.0
Fan Headers	(8) 4-Pin
Legacy Interfaces	✗
Other Interfaces	FP-Audio,(2)RGBW-LED, (2) D-LED, TPM, (2)Thermistor Header, Thunderbolt AIC
Diagnostics Panel	Numeric
Internal Button/Switch	Reset / BIOS ROM, BIOS Mode
SATA Controllers	Integrated (0/1/5/10)
Ethernet Controllers	WGI219V PHY
Wi-Fi / Bluetooth	Intel 9560 802.11ac 2x2 (1.73Gb/s) / BT 5 Combo
USB Controllers	✗
HD Audio Codec	ALC1220
DDL/DTS Connect	✗

what is up guys now in gigabytes horas Z 390 line there's actually a total of eight motherboards but sitting right in the middle is this board right here which is the gigabyte Z 390 horas ultra so let's go ahead and take a look taking a first look at the board we can see that gigabyte has gone with an all-black PCB with silver accents typically when it comes to the Auris boards gigabyte likes to keep the colors neutral and they let the RGB do the rest this board is no different and

we'll be showing you the RGB lighting here in just a little bit starting at the CPU socket we of course have Intel's LGA 1151 socket Z 390 board support both eighth and ninth generation Intel Core processors this board features a 12 plus one power phase design that makes use of a digital PWM controller and dr. Moss the power deliberate components are covered by two heat sinks that are actually connected by a heat pipe and this heat pipe will make direct contact with

the MOSFETs for the best cooling performance gigabyte has sort of connected these heat sinks to the rear i/o cover which makes the top corner look like a single piece and I kind of really like that hidden towards the top corner of the board is your 8 plus 4 EPS connector as well as a 4 pin fan header moving over towards the memory slots there are two more fan headers which are for your CPU and CPU optional fans the memory slots on the board make use of gigabytes

memory armor which is a one-piece stainless steel design along the edge of the board there are two RGB headers one is a standard 4 pin header and the other is a 3 pin addressable header then you have your 24 pin ATX power connection a USB 3.1 genuine header and a USB 3.1 gen2 type-c internal header coming down the board you'll find a Thunderbolt header as well as 6 SATA 6 gigabits these are controlled by the Z 390 chipset along the bottom of the board is where you're going to find the rest of your headers and connections so from left to right you

have your audio headers two more RGB headers again there is a four pin standard and eight three pin addressable EPM header comport header two USB 2.0 headers a postcode display 3/4 pin fan headers and finally your front panel connections for audio gigabyte is using their amp up audio solution which leverages the realtek ALC 12:20 audio codec with a smart headphone amp and as far as expansion slots go on the board you have three PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots and three x1 slots all three of the x16 slots have gigabytes PCI Express shield which again is a single

piece of metal there are actually three PCI Express 3.0 x4 m dot two slots on this board all three of them have integrated heat sinks and I think they look awesome finally we come to the rear i/o which has an integrated IO shield this is something I love to see on motherboards as far as rear i/o ports go from left to right you have two USB 2.0 ports Wi-Fi antenna connectors two more USB 2.0 ports two USB 3.1 gn1 ports HDMI four USB 3.1 gen2 ports three of these are type-a

and the other is Type C Gigabit Ethernet and of course your audio connections now as far as lighting goes on the board you have RGB LEDs on the i/o cover front edge of the board your PCH heatsink as well as the audio cover overall I think the lighting on the board looks great and of course you can control it with gigabytes RGB fusion software alright guys so at the end of the day we have a really great Z 394 this might be my favorite Z 390 board that I've reviewed so far it just has so many great features and it has that awesome horse look that you're either

gonna love or hate but we definitely love it with all of the RGB lighting now for a Z 390 board it of course has m2 slots this board specifically has three PCI Express 3.0 four slots and they all come with the integrated heat sinks so if you might buy like two different em two drives it's gonna mess up the whole look of the board but with this you don't have to worry because you have those integrated heat sinks this board as expected would have USB 3.1 gen2 but you have the internal header on this board so if you have a case that has a type C you know front port

you can easily connect it to your motherboard that way you also get that awesome RGB lighting which I said and you have a really good audio solution on this board too now when it came to overclocking we were able to get our core I 999 hundred K all the way up to five point one gigahertz and one thing I was really surprised about was that our temperatures were really in check typically when we would overclock the 99 hundred K with our 240 millimeter a IO temperatures would be really high like 8090 you know going on a hundred degrees under full

load that's not very good of course we know that 99 hundred K is really hot but with this we were like 75 to 77 degrees under full load at all of the cores at 5.1 gigahertz that has a lot to do with the thermal design of this board you also have that 12 plus one power phase design and you have the extra connector to bring even more stable power to your CPU so a lot of good stuff there when it comes to overclock and you also have a really great BIOS and great motherboard companion software as well now the one downside to this board is that it is a little bit expensive

it's 249 which you can get a lot of Z 390 boards for under that but I think with all of the features and the great looks and the thermal design and everything that this board has it's definitely worth that price and again if you're doing any heavy overclocking this is definitely a board that I would consider so go ahead and check the link below to our full review of this

board which will have all of the benchmarks so you can see all of that stuff we'll also have a link below where you can go ahead and pick this board up .

I'm sure you guys are excited for all the ex-wives having stuff that's coming up don't worry the second we're allowed to show you some fresh X 570 boards will be spamming your sub box tool that risin 3 thousands of goodness but but now there's still a few more Zed 3 naughty boys to check out in the meantime so given its horas week on the channel we figured that it would be fitting if we checked out a Z through 90 board that we haven't got a hands on before so that's what we're gonna do in this video we're checking out the gigabyte Z 390 horas ultra

motherboard that supports eighth and ninth Gen Intel CPUs let's check it out , just before we start this video I just want to make this super clear for all of our motherboard videos that they're not reviews they're just overview so you can get an idea of the feature set of the boards and what comes in the box when you buy these new motherboards all right let's our let's do a motherboard thing all righty ladies and gentlemen it's time to check out the z3 90 horas I'll Chuck here's the box this is what the box looks like now let's get the board out and take a look

at all other things that you get in that big ol box get out of there motherboard alright first thing you're gonna notice is this sheet of stickers now these up stickers so you can stick them on things alright if we do get next we have the gigabyte warranty commitment card now this is gigabytes commitment to honoring your warranty pretty straightforward okay what have we got next yeah here we go a multilingual installation guide now this will help you install your

motherboard in multiple languages just as the name States what else we got in here okay he is the z3 90 or ultra user manual now this manual is very helpful if you don't know how to do something with your motherboard most likely the answer will be in here so yeah make sure you know where this is at all times right what do you got next this circular device I never know what these are because they don't make sense that they still exist okay that was a cool transition alright now what else have we got in here there's a little Oris badge so you can stick it onto your

case if you're into that kind of thing it's kind of old school but I like that they still make these kind of things all right what do we go next yeah oh let's uh let's see what lies underneath lift up that black plastic and all the other biddies now we've got some MDOT two screws and some stand off so you can screw in all your MDOT two drives and all the slots on the motherboard which we're gonna talk about a little bit later and what are we got here we've got we got a Wi-Fi antenna because this motherboard has Wi-Fi built in one thing I like about these Wi-Fi

antennas is they're magnetic so you can actually stick them to the side panel of your case so yeah you don't have to dangling all around the place alright what else have we got in here what's this oh the G connector I like this little guy this is so you can plug all your front panel stuff into this one connector it makes it nice and easy and just plug it into one block straight into your motherboard alright what else do we got here oh now this is handy this is an addressable RGB to Corsair RGB connector so you don't need to use a command a pro or a

lighting node Pro you can just plug your Corsair stuff straight into this alright where do we got some more SATA yep we've got four-sided cable so you can plug in your spinning rust or your 2.5 inch SSDs into your motherboard to make life nice and cruising alright alright there's some thermal probes these are to probe your thermals I'm not trying to be rude it's just a bit of a dad joke this is a these are probes you can place anywhere in your case so you can get readings of

temperature great for overclocking ok what else we got here addressable RGB extension cable I guess that's what that is ok that's pretty nice what else we got I think the last bit that is lying in the bottom of the box is these velcro straps really good for cable management yeah most gigabyte motherboards have these in the box and I think they're great for cable management didn't I just say that ok let's put all that stuff back in so we can get this motherboard out of the plastic so we can take a closer look at what lies inside or rather on top of the z3 90 horas ultra

alright we've got our front panel audio connector we've got addressable RGB and regular analog RGB we've got 2 USB 2.0 headers to connect your a IOT's or any other type of a thing that requires it you've got this diagnostic LED screen that will tell you if anything's wrong with your motherboard three PWM fan connectors and the front panel connectors to connect all of your lights and all of your switches we've got 6 SATA connectors so you can plug in your spinning rüstow your 2.5 inch SSDs we have a USB 3.1 gen2 header so you can plug in that USB

type-c for all that speed goodness we have the USB 3.0 header we have a PWM fan connector and a 24 pin power connector so you can power all of that greatness that comes from this motherboard all right why do we go next okay we've got another addressable RGB header and another analog RGB header across the top of the board as well as a a i/o pump connector and a CPU fan connector there's an eight pin EPS connector as well as a four pin a PS connect this you can power your 9900 Kay that's what this board is designed to do speaking of such things

it's a standard 11 v 1-2 socket or Gen 2 socket that supports eighth and ninth gen Intel CPUs and it's got standard Intel CPU cooler mounting holes it's got an array of PCIe slots 16 times eight times four times and some one-time slots as well there's three MDOT two slots on the board I'm just gonna pull off the heatsink here so you can see what's underneath it supports all MDOT two sizes all the most common ones anyway to make life nice and easy for ddr4 Ram slots that support overclocked memory up to 40 400 megahertz the vrm cooling is quite

substantial and it's too cool the 12+1 phase VRMs on this beast of a motherboard alright let's take a look at what's on the back obviously there's an integrated I old there's our two USB ports some Wi-Fi connectors two more USB ports some USB 3.0 ports for daca which is for your audio interfaces it's nice and clean HDMI there's USB type-c 3.1 gen2 and type-a ports there's Gigabit Ethernet some more USB 3.1 ports and all of the audio you could possibly need speaking of audio , if you guys are interested in grabbing the gigabyte

z3 19 horas i'll try it's going II dues on Amazon right now dues at the time of reviewing this review there is a link down below if you guys want to grab yourself one of these boards from either Australia or America I don't know where you guys are from let's be honest while we're talking about or is the Auris fan fest is on it my pin Sydney on the 22nd of June and you can grab yourself free tickets at the link

pinned in this review's comment section thing and in the description and yeah there'll be a bunch of giveaways and a bunch of new products for you guys to get your hands on with and also Claire and I'll be there so yeah come say hi and we hope to see some of you guys there too also ah you'll notice that I'm wearing this different kind of hat this is from an awesome company called a Drac they make these awesome stylized kind of dad dad style hats I really like these you

guys know that I usually wear this kind of stuff also yeah I just wanted to mention them because uh we're doing some stuff with them at the moment because they support the Australian prostate cancer foundation of Australia so all the money will not all the money but 10% of all the sales go to help prostate cancer research and I think that's very important men's health is very important so yeah yeah support these guys they're really awesome there's links to all their stuff in the description below if you guys want to grab some of these hats they got a

bunch of designs that I really like they actually sent us a bunch as well so I'm gonna be like wearing them in the next couple reviews .

Gigabyte Z390 AORUS ULTRA Gaming Motherboard review

we're looking at the Zed 390 in particular now as some of you know Zed 390 year's Intel's latest iteration of chipset and with that brings a whole tour well I say a whole new host of features so things like Wi-Fi and USB 3.1 gen2 comes automatically enabled within the chipset as opposed to having something that's you know extra through a controller from as media or Marvel or even just Intel themselves so with that in mind we've got the z3 90 horas master now this

probably sounds a little bit different to what you're used to so as you may remember and you can probably see on the camera they used to have the gaming 7 or the gaming 5 or the gaming 3 they've actually changed all their names now so the master is the well I guess the top the creme de la creme this is replacing the gaming 7 that's not to say that there won't be a gaming 9 equivalent at a later date but at the moment for the Zed 390 chipset this is what we've got so let's jump in and take a look so I'm not gonna go too much into the box typically it's what we

kind of expect orange coloring that's what gigabyte do with their horas themed products gives you a few sort of you know indications as to what we are to expect including the 12 + 2 phase digital power design and obviously the ESS hijack audio on the back of the box nothing really out of the ordinary they're a spec list and a first view of the board and I'm gonna be honest the board does look pretty nice so let's get with unboxing it and before we really get into the board side of things we want to have a look at obviously what comes included so this seems to be a bit

of a growing trend we do get a lot of stickers I've seen this with a zeus and msi in the past and yet it seems gigabyte doing it as well so lots of stickers you could put on your case you can put on your your door you know wherever you want we get the multi-language installation guide a user's manual and inside there we have a driver CD I'm not sure why I personally prefer USB flash drives it just sort of you know seems the more logical option to go down there there you go we have a an addressable RGB header into looks like a three pink fan header so either way it's

to do with fans and RGB we have a couple of standoffs for your MDOT two drives so the actual standoff itself and then the screw to mount the m-dot to drive down we have some yeah that's just a probe policy temperature readings we have an SLI bridge I'm guessing it would be high bandwidth most motherboard manufacturers are actually putting you in high bandwidth bridges these days but obviously with the new graphics cards that are outside the twenty series

that's not gonna even work anyway because you need an NV link we have some SATA cables so two in there one of them being right-angled we have a another weird connector which is it looks like an extension cable for addressable RGB movie no this isn't for addressable so this is for I'm sort of your full scale while GB so we do have an extension cable for that we have another standoff for an end up to drive and another screw straight away kinda tells us that this board is going to have multiple MDOT two drives because there are at least two so far we have another

one of those addressable cables as well we have a Wi-Fi antenna so as I said there's s/390 chips air she brings us Wi-Fi now instead of going for an extra controller so I think not only the the I one into one 9v controller I think is but yet everything it's done for the desert 390 chipset so we have got the Wi-Fi antenna for that with two connectors we do have some Morris branded velcro cable ties as well just keep things neat and tidy some more SATA cables one of them being right angled again we have another probe as well so lots of probing going on from

gigabyte we have probably one of the handiest connectors that you can get for a motherboard so or ass or gigabyte brand this is the G connector so you can basically plug in all of your front panel connectors and once you've done that you can just basically put it onto the board instead of trying to sort of scramble inside the chassis and getting everything there and then we have a little case patch sticker so let's get all this out of the way and let's take a look at the motherboard so we've got the board out and I guess first thing I want to talk about the general

styling of the board I mean it looks I'm gonna be honest pretty bitchin so we have a black PCB and lots of well metal assets I guess you could call it so we have a lot of what they typically call armor so the armor obviously encompasses the n dot two slots we have some around the PCI Express as well just to give not just looks but also that extra kind of strength and stability when it comes to using graphics cards are a lot weightier should we say I do like the fact that the i/o and everything kind of meets quite nicely but you can see just the way that everything kind of

flows into the rear i/o with this kind of shielded cover it has got the typical horas branding on there as well so we have a Norris sort bit of text here the Auris logo and all of this actually lights up with RGB as well obviously can be controlled using the RGB fusion software that you can download from gigabytes website I think I'm pretty sure you agree in terms of sort of the the chunky heat sings it does actually add to kind of I guess the stigma that you'd expect with a high-end board so you'd expect a high import to have kind of chunkier more meaty kind of

something that kind of means performance if you know what I mean so with this you do see obviously a large heat sink area that goes around the phases and this is a 12 plus 2 phase design talking about power obviously we have our conventional 24-pin but there are also two eight pin power connectors you will find a lot of Zed 390 boards some have an 8 pin some have an 8 plus 4 this actually has two 8 pins so we are expecting some good sort of clean power when it comes to it and gigabyte else you do some other stuff branded as kind of under their ultra durable

moniker is instead of using the conventional pins that you'd expect on your your power connectors there's used solid pins this gives a a higher surface area and cleaner contact when it comes to actually delivering the power to the CPU socket and with that that obviously means you're going to get a very clean very stable power and along with that it does give you maybe potentially a little bit more room when it comes to overclocking so that's something that obviously we're really excited to do to sort of see how far we can push this because if it's

anything like Zed 370 a lot of the boards were actually very similar in what they could do through overclocking I'm hoping maybe there's something a little bit more but if there isn't it's not a bad thing because there are still a lot of features on here which I'm very excited about in terms of the amount of m dot 2 slots the amount of PCI Express slots so I guess really we should sort of jump into that a little bit more but before I sort of finish discussing the general design another thing I want to talk about is the rear so on the rear they've actually put a bit of an

armored backplate now whether this helps with dissipation of heat or not you know I'm not an engineer so I'm not even gonna try and guess but I do know that for a fact this is actually gonna give extra stability when mounting heavier Hardware so like I was saying with a heavy graphics card with a large heat sink like a not your D 15 this is all going to assist in kind of making your your system nice and stable not just from a performance sort of state of view or point of view but also from an aesthetic point of view just making sure that your components are going to last CPU socket is obviously 11 51 and does support both APN and the new ninth gen processors

including the i9 9900 k that we're going to be testing this winter today so when it comes to the heat sinks like I said we have got the large area around the CPU socket which is going to help cool down the MOSFETs now gigabyte have again their own sort of technology and they call it the advanced thermal design so just have to check that advanced thermal design it encompasses quite a few different things including the fins array heating so what they actually claim from

that is that you can increase the heat dissipation by about 300% just by the way that they've actually organised and kind of constructed their heat sinks there are a few other heat sinks I'm here as well obviously we have one over the chipset which encompasses the Auris logo and then we do have the one over the audio area as well as that one on the back so we do have that now when it comes to the m2 I actually like the way that they've done these I'm not too sure on the

kind of slotted grooves I would have preferred kind of just the brushed metal like they've done on the top one but it's really nice that they've put the model name of the board on there as well obviously these are gonna help with heat dissipation and they do just add to the general styling so we will sort of you know potentially have a look at that in the future but if you want to find out more information about any of these kind of proprietary can technologies that gigabyte

offer including the advanced thermal design and the thermal guard I think they call it on the MDOT two slots then head over to gigabytes website there's so much information on there that you may actually find some is relevant to what you're doing in your own personal rig if you were to use a board like this taking a look at the memory support on this board it supports up to four thousand two hundred and sixty-six megahertz and beyond which I still don't quite

understand how that words but there you go maximum capacity is 64 gigabytes and both ECC and non-ecc modules are supported XMP is supported and the slots are armored with the Auris proprietary stainless steel ultra durable memory armor shielding which a long way of preventing ESD also stops your PCB from flexing under the pressure of the components so let's talk fan headers so on this board we actually have seven in total now some of them do double up as water pump connectors as well which means that they do have just a slightly higher

output when two amps so it can actually support up to two amps and gives you variable voltage control pretty great feature if you ask me especially if you are doing something like custom loop now trying to look for these on the board pretty easy we've got to at the top for your CPU so you got your CPU fan and CPU optional we've got one just to the right the DIMM slots we have one just underneath the i/o and then another three down the bottom and as I say you can control all this variably to a certain degree this is where gigabytes smart fan 5 software comes

into action again you can head over to the gigabyte website and find a lot more information on this software and exactly what you can do but it does give you quite a lot of control not just over fan speed but just the way that it actually interacts with the hardware that you've plugged into the board which in my opinion is actually a pretty useful feature so we've said 319 we do get a couple of extra features that I guess in the past would have been sort of controlled through an

AZ media controller or Marvell or something like that and that generally involves extra costs having that built into the chipset actually means that you're able to get a better cost for the motherboard without sort of going you know crazy so we do have things like USB 3.1 we do have a USB 3.1 gen2 type-c port you have to bear with me we've got Gen 1 and Gen 2 on the same board notice it's all getting a little bit crazy down the bottom of the board we have two USB 2.0 ports so there's plenty of kind of connectivity just on the i/o side of things we've as you

go into the rear of the board just to kind of keep you going with USB 3.1 USB type-c as well as your your legacy USB to other features on the board that you will find is just a few for kind of overclocking so we have got a debug LED and reset switch and this is quite handy when overclocking because generally you wouldn't have this in a chassis if you're doing like we do reviews and things so it's just easier to kind of you know be able to press a button we do have some other features as well like TPM headers and we do have a thunderbolt adding card

connector and we do have some BIOS switches as well so there's quite a few features I guess it kind of the average overclock is going to use for most people some of these features won't actually be a necessity but it's nice to have especially if you're not paying any extra for them we also have something that I've I guess been waiting for for quite a while from gigabyte so gigabyte where they're pre sports when it came to addressable headers they had a proprietary connector well they have listened to us reviewers they've listened to the consumers and now

they've decided to actually go to a standard that everyone else is doing so what you'll find is we do have our typical RGB headers down here but we do also have an addressable or digital or however you want to brand it we have addressable RGB headers on this board so it's nice to sort of see I guess gigabytes of going into that room now we do have just more we have more than just the two down the bottom so we've got a standard and an addressable then at the top we have another standard one and another addressable when it comes to actually using RGB

whether it be addressable or standard there's nothing stopping you getting hub of some kind so technically you only really need one of these ports but it's nice to have kind of a multitude of them so two at the top two at the bottom what more could you ask for in terms of storage we've got six SATA three ports and they all support raid zero one five and ten and obviously does also include irst so for anyone needing anything on the SATA side of things you're pretty well covered with six ports when it comes to m dot two there are three gen 3 X 4 slots the top

supports type 20 to 40 to 20 to 60 20 to 80 and 20 to 110 sized modules and include support for both satyr and PCI Express X for SSDs as well as supporting Intel hybrid SSDs the second slot supports the same size modules as the first and include support for both satyr and PCIe x4 while the third slot only supports 20 to 40 to 20 to 60 and 20 to 80 and only PCI Express x4 modules this body is also obtained ready and if you want to find out more about that you can do so by clicking on the card above as we said earlier all three of these slots are covered by

gigabytes patented thermal guard technology and it is also worth noting that you can actually put all three of these drives in a raid configuration which is pretty unique considering MDOT two driver well pretty fast to start with so be interested and maybe do a follow up feature let us know in the comments section below if you'd like to see us do something where essentially we put free MDOT to nvme drives in here and see you know what kind of blistering speeds we can actually get moving on from that I guess the next thing to talk about is going to be the your

expansion slots now we didn't mention earlier that they do have the thermal guard on there and it's worth noting that even though we have three x16 slots sadly they don't all operate at x16 speeds so when it comes to our Z x16 based configurations you have got the top slot which is a physical x16 slot Bay and it does operate at x16 speed the next one operates at x8 speeds and then lastly the third one operates at x4 speeds obviously if you are using these in a multi GPU configuration whether it be crossfire or SLI then these are liable to change to slower speed so

you're looking at x8 and x8 and so forth you do also have some PCI Express 1 slot so there are 3 of them in total and as I did mention the x16 slots are covered in that patented armor just so you don't end up with GPU sag I'm sure we've all said it before it's not the nicest thing to look at so I'm really glad that they've actually put on there and it does add to the aesthetics as well which I'm really really happy for talking about GPU configurations it does support crossfire

SLI and yes that does include the latest Nvidia MV link if you are rocking the 2080 2080 ti or a guess after actually filming this 2070 graphics cards it's worth noting on the rear of the board it does incorporate a full integrated i/o shield plate which firstly looks great and secondly makes building a PC a little bit easier I absolutely love that boards do this now because I'm sure we've all done it before where we've built a PC and realize that you forgot to put the i/o plate shield on so now let's talk about the connectors from left to right we have a power and reset button we have a clear CMOS button two antenna connectors for the built-in Wi-Fi this runs on Intel's

802.11 AC wave 2 cnv iy5 with bluetooth 5.0 moving on from there there are four USB 2.0 ports which seeing so many of these is actually a little bit disappointing on a board of this caliber and most M can easily have been upgraded to USB 3.1 instead next up we have two USB 3.0 backup ports along with a HDMI port there are three USB 3.1 gen2 type-c ports and also a USB 3.1 gen2 type-c port gen 2 ports are now actually integrated into the new zed 390 chipset there is a single Ethernet LAN port which does support gigabit speeds thanks to the intel controller and

lastly there are five gold-plated audio jacks and also an optical s/pdif l the audio is catered for by the realtek AOC one two two zero VB codec and uses the ESS Sabre nine one one eight DAC with high-definition 7.1 channel audio so now that we've kind of spoke through the whole design and the features well there's only really two things that we need to still do the first one is we need to overclock it so let's tell you exactly how we did now in terms of overclocking we

actually managed to push our I 999 hundred K to five gigahertz which I'm sure you agree is no small feat it was quite an achievement to do that especially considering that we're talking eight cores 16 threads on essentially a consumer CPU to get this we did have to pump the voltage up to about one point three seven five now if we spent a little bit more time tinkering we may have been able to get this down but we did try it one point three five volts and it got to about 78% in one of our tests before it crashed out so somewhere between one point three five and one point

three seven five I'm sure there's a sweet spot in there obviously a lot of that is going to come down to your cooler and being temperature what power supply you're using there's quite a lot of variables but I was quite happy with five gigahertz especially on a processor of that nature so now that we've got that other way I guess really the main thing to do is to show you how this performs now I want to have a little warning in here just like zr3 70 a lot of these they're 390

boards are very very similar in performance but let's show you them numbers anyway, so there you have it I mean you can see that from the test results this pretty much came out on top for most of the tests apart from PC mark 10 for some reason that's just a law unto itself a bit of an anomaly but even though it did come out on top there has to be a bit of a disclaimer here that says well when you look at say some of the boards that perform the least in some tests

compared to all the ones that did the best there was only maybe see two frames per second in it in certain tests there was only a few points or a few hundred points I feel that if we were to run all these tests again it might gone completely the other way that's not to discourage you from buying this board if I'm completely honest with you I think this board looks absolutely amazing especially with all the RGB lights on and just kind of what gigabyte have done with that the

general design and knowing some of the features that they've actually incorporated I've been to the gigabyte factories and I've seen some of the care and quality that goes into gigabytes boards and I will tell you it's absolutely mind-blowing how they're just able to think about the small little details so some of the things to do with the ultra-durable 5 such as the pins in the connectors the thermal guards and just you know the layers of PCBs it's all the little things like that that really add up and then we've got a look at things like price so price on this board .

. I'm actually pretty happy with that considering they're some boards I know are coming out on the market at the time of reviewing this they're gonna be well about top of this I'm not gonna name any names but you've got a look at the facts so if you do like gigabyte boards and you do want something that's going to perform pretty much on par with everything else but it's gonna give you stability is going to give you a really good design and I'm pretty sure

that you're agree there's plenty of features on this board that you couldn't really find anything that it can't do hopefully that all makes sense to you guys let us know in the comments section below is this the sort of board that you'd go for you gotta remember this is gigabytes flagship board on the Zed 390 chipset you get USB gen 2 you get so many features with it but there is

one thing I have to say sorry gigabyte but the USB 2.0 ports on the back four of them I feel that that could have been maybe upgraded to USB 3.1 so I'm not really happy about that but based on the price it's not a deal-breaker for me hopefully you enjoyed the review .