At £390 / $360, Gigabyte’s X570 Aorus Master motherboard is presently some of the costly X570 boards you’ll be able to presently purchase for AMD’s newest crop of Ryzen 3000 CPUs. Sure, you get a variety of helpful extras, reminiscent of three PCIe 4.Zero M.2 connections (plus accompanying heatsinks) on your SSDs and three PCIe 4.Zero x16 slots on your graphics card and different enlargement playing cards, however is it actually value spending all that extra cash when you may get one thing just like the MSI X570 Gaming Edge for nearly half as a lot money? Here’s wot I believe.
On the face of it, the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master is kind of a decent-looking motherboard. Backed with a pleasant easy plate so your fingers don’t get pronged once you finally come to construct your new PC, this RGB-ified mobo has loads of helpful options that the MSI Gaming Edge merely doesn’t have. For starters, it comes with a entrance panel connector doodad within the field so that you don’t must faff round connecting all these tiny little case cables with a magnifying glass handy, and it additionally has a BIOS LED indicator to assist with any potential troubleshooting.
It additionally comes with 4 SATA cables, Wi-Fi antenna, two velcro cable ties, two thermistor cables to assist measure your PC’s inside temperatures, a noise-detection cable, in addition to an addressable LED strip adapter and an RGB strip extension cable to assist gentle up a appropriate case, plus loads of M.2 screws and stand-offs on your SSDs.
The Aorus Master helps as much as 64GB of DDR4 RAM, with speeds ranging between 2133-3200MHz.
That’s much more than what you get with the £220 / $210 MSI X570 Gaming Edge, however in relation to general efficiency, the Aorus Master leaves quite a bit to be desired. In Geekbench 4.3, for instance, the Aorus Master managed a single core rating of simply 5072, and a multicore rating of 31,260. That’s 3% slower than the MSI on each counts, though I ought to word that equally priced boards such because the £390 / $380 Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero (Wi-Fi) and £297 / $300 AsRock X570 Taichi didn’t fare significantly better, with all three boards coming in with kind of similar scores to the Gigabyte.
The Aorus Master regained some floor after I ran it via PCMark 10’s common desktop benchmark, admittedly, as right here it really completed simply ten factors behind its MSI rival with an general rating of 6630. This additionally places it forward of each the Asus Crosshair and AsRock Taichi, which completed with scores of 6577 and 5692 respectively, however it nonetheless doesn’t really feel such as you’re actually getting one other £100 / $100’s value of additional efficiency right here.
The X570 Aorus Master include a great deal of USB ports, plus two Ethernet ports.
As a gaming motherboard, the Aorus Master is as soon as once more a bit center of the street. We’re solely actually speaking a distinction of 1-3fps right here, so it’s unlikely you’ll actually see a lot of a distinction in on a regular basis use, however it nonetheless makes the Gigabyte really feel a bit overpriced in comparison with its cheaper and nippier competitors. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, as an illustration, the Gigabyte Aorus Master managed a mean of 110fps on Highest at 1080p with its TAA anti-aliasing enabled, which is a smidge higher than the AsRock’s 108fps and Asus Crosshair’s 109fps, however none of them might high the MSI’s common of 111fps. It was just about the identical story at 1440p as properly, with the MSI coming in with a mean of 100fps over the Gigabyte and Asus’ 99fps and the AsRocks’ 98fps.
The Gigabyte didn’t impress after I moved over to Total War: Warhammer II, both. Here, it really produced the slowest common body charges of the lot, coming in with simply 105fps on Ultra at 1080p and 92fps at 1440p. The others, in the meantime, ranged between 106-107fps at 1080p, and 93-94fps at 1440p.
All three of the Aorus Master’s M.2 slots include detachable heatsinks.
The solely game the place the Gigabyte actually asserted itself was Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Here, it managed a mean of 77fps on Ultra High at 1080p within the game’s benchmarking software, beating the MSI by 3fps, the Asus by 2fps and the AsRock by 1fps. It all obtained a bit samey at 1440p, although, with each the Gigabyte and MSI managing a mean of 66fps on Ultra High, whereas the Asus and AsRock pipped them each to the publish with scores of 67fps.
All three M.2 slots assist the super-fast PCIe 4.Zero normal, too.
It’s not just like the Aorus Master is a few nice SSD pace demon, both. Yes, it might have produced barely quicker random learn and write speeds than the MSI Gaming Edge with my PCIe 3.0 WD Black NVMe SSD (46.4MB/s and 159.8MB/s respectively), however it’s nonetheless obtained nothing on the Asus or AsRock, notably in relation to random write speeds. The Asus, as an illustration, managed 161.2MB/s, whereas the AsRock was method out in entrance with 178.7MB/s.
It additionally produced the slowest random learn and write speeds after I tried it with my PCIe 4.0 Gigabyte Aorus NVMe Gen4 SSD, too – which is ironic, actually, provided that Gigabyte made each of them. Indeed, whereas the Aorus Master managed a reasonably comparable random learn pace of 65MB/s, its random write pace of 151.9MB/s was a very good 10MB/s slower than each the Asus and MSI.
You get three PCIe 4.Zero x16 slots on the Aorus Master, however solely the highest one runs on the full x16. The second runs at x8, whereas the third runs at x4.
As for the AsRock, I wasn’t really capable of match the Gigabyte SSD onto that exact board, as its built-in heatsink panel didn’t go away sufficient room for it. Likewise, even when I’d eliminated the AsRock’s heatsink panel, I’d have needed to have left it dangling round inside my case because of the small cluster of wires attaching it to the primary board, which is neither very sensible or one thing you’d wish to put up with long-term.
As a end result, as a lot as I like all of the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master’s further options, it does really feel very costly and never notably good worth for cash in comparison with different X570 boards on the market. Instead, these seeking to take advantage of their hard-earned pennies ought to in all probability go together with the MSI MPG X570 Gaming Edge as an alternative – until, after all, you propose on shopping for a great deal of PCIe 4.Zero SSDs once they come out, or really want that third PCIe x16 slot for one thing. However, when you assume you can also make do with only one PCIe 4.Zero SSD and two PCIe x16 slots, you then’ll in all probability be a lot happier with the MSI.
