Gigabyte Z390 AORUS Master review - Final Words & Conclusion

Conclusion

Gigabyte designed an awesome motherboard with the new Z390 Aorus Master. It simply is a well-built and designed product that ticks all the boxes that Z390 has to offer. Granted though, after having tested roughly 5 boards, the performance all is more or less the same, as well as the features. Big plusses for the Aorus board are the integration of three M2 slots the accompanying heatsinks. Performance overall we cannot complain about. We did have a rougher time with tweaking though, however, we have to blame the early BIOS here as the motherboard certainly can deal with it. Talking about that, it master has a beautifully cooled VRM design, the thermal images have been impressive to watch alright. Where Gigabyte needs to improve though is the BIOS, it just looks dated and simply is not very user-friendly, that's as far as my comment go though. Z390 remains to be a bit of a simple release, it is a small step upwards with merely adding native USB 3.1 Gen 2 and WIFI, that and it's better optimized on the VRM area to deal with the new 8-core processors. However, the motherboard manufacturers always seem to improve and excel on what is available. Aesthetically speaking I think this board is one of the best motherboards out there, just gorgeous. 

Power consumption

With this eight cores and sixteen threads proc you get a 95 Watt TDP processor. With the system at idle with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti installed / 16 GB memory / SSD and the Z390 motherboard, I hovered at roughly 60~65 Watts in IDLE. That's okay, the load values are okay as well but definitely higher. When we stressed the processor 100% run we reach roughly 200 Watts with this 8-core part. That's the entire system. That is on the high side alright. Then again, does anyone actually care about it when you get performance metrics like shown today?

DDR4 Memory

For Coffee Lake-S (8th and 9th Gen Intel procs) and DDR4 we always say, volume matters more than frequency. A 3,200 MHz kit, for example, is more expensive and does offer better bandwidth but the performance increase in real-world usage will be hard to find. Unless you transcode videos over the processor a lot. As always, my advice would be to go with lower clocked DDR4 memory with decent timings, but get more of it. Don't go for 8 GB, get two or four DIMMs and in total a minimum of 16 GB. The reason we test at 3200 MHz is simple, we do the same for AMD Ryzen and want to create a fair and equal playing ground for both. 3200 MHz is, however, a very nice equilibrium for both processor brands.

Performance & tweaking

We tested multiple Z390 motherboards all with the latest BIOS. As stated, this review was conducted with an early F4 bios and the tweaking process was more difficult compared to the competition. We need a more than expected voltage to reach an all core 5.1 GHz. As stated, I have no doubt it can do 5200 MHz, but the board likely requires a bit of a BIOS update. 

Final words

For me, the Z390 Aorus master ticks most of the right boxes. looks matter, and the looks for this board are just great. Especially once powered up, the subtle LED elements really make the magic happen. We love the WIFI integration, albeit it wasn't performing as fast as the competition? We like the three musketeer M2 slots with heatsinks, which enhances the looks again as well. The BIOS needs some work though, I mean that in regards to tweaking and overclocking as well as a visual overhaul. Other than that there's little to complain really, fast WiFi, support for SLI and CrossFire, and an ALC1220 audio codec with s/pdif and three M2 slots. I would, however, have liked to see that new 2.5 Gigabit Realtek chip for Ethernet as I cannot believe that we're almost in the year 2019 with another chipset refresh and I still have to mention that we need to move to faster NICs. At the time of writing it looks that this mobo is going to cost 275 EUR or something in that range. Gigabyte did things right from both a hardware and aesthetic design, the Z390 Aorus master is easily in my personal top three boards. 

Handy related downloads: 

• Prime95
• AfterBurner
• AIDA64
• HWiNFO64
• SiSoft Sandra
• 3DMark Download v2.3.3732 + Time Spy
• CPU-Z
• HWMonitor
  
  
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