Gigabyte Aorus X470 Gaming 7 Wifi review - Conclusion

Final Words 

The Aorus Gaming 7 is a nice looking motherboard, once you power on the PC however, it will look sincerely terrific.  And yeah, in this day and age motherboards are not "just" about performance and features anymore. Aesthetics have become such a massive ingredient of the recipe that is to become your PC. The Aorus Gaming 7 Wifi series (for me) hits that sweet-spot. A near perfect balance of all the best in features that a Ryzen platform has to offer combined with exquisite looks. Performance is at roughly the same level as the competition as well, you get a properly outfitted motherboard with all the connectivity and features you need. Gigabyte offers nice audio, AC WIFI, and two M.2 slots, properly cooled. Then there are dual multi-GPU slots, six SATA3 slots, all the USB connectivity you need. AMD made a very nice step forward with what pretty much is a bit of a die-shrink and tweaking. When you look at absolute numbers the 2700X is a good 10% faster than a 1800X, however, what you really need to be comparing to is the 1700X, and that's a 20% difference in performance. Now everything, however, has to do with the increased clock-frequency, over time the platform that houses Ryzen has evolved and matured as well, it all adds up from lower latency, better memory support, faster base clock, higher turbo bins, the accumulation of it all is what has become Ryzen 2000. It is a truly fast threading processor! Game performance at the lowest resolution, hey Intel still wins there but the margin and gap have become smaller. I stated in the original Ryzen review already that 1080p gaming really isn't an issue, except, maybe in that grey matter in between your ears. Everything is trivial towards pricing, and what I did not see coming is the price level of the 2700X. The asking price of 329 USD for this processor is just staggering and oozes value. With Ryzen 2000 / Zen+ the 3.8~4.0 GHz domain also has been breached. Zen+ can easily do 4.2 GHz, the top-notch SKUs 4.3 and with a bit of luck on all cores, you can achieve 4.3 or 4.4 GHz with a bit of liquid cooling. Ergo, I am impressed as to what Ryzen 7 2700X is offering.

The motherboard

Gigabyte designed an exquisite X470 motherboard, for you to believe me you really need to see it powered on with the LED lit DIMM and PCIe slots.A truly nice offering, it ain't cheap though isn't expensive either at € 239,- But yes it is a motherboard with very nice of features and options when looking at USB3.1, SATA ports, AC WIFI, M2, the looks, and functionality. Oh and also the RGB bling. That said, we have no doubt that with the new generation processors and chipsets there are bound to be a few motherboard firmware updates and fixes for smaller bugs. It comes with the territory. We quite honestly did not run into stuff that massively worried us. The motherboard used seems pretty well tuned. Memory worked straight out of the box, we tried both the 3200 and 3400 MHz kits we have from G.Skill. Tweaking wise, the motherboards will not be any limitation, not from any brand as the Zen+ processor all will reach that 4.2~4.4 GHz domain. 

Gaming performance

Previous Ryzen reviews have taught me that it is extremely hard to convince a big part of the guru3d community and reader base that Ryzen is plenty fast for gaming. The new Zen+ processors and the respective platform overall bring a bit more oomph compared to last years Ryzen. The fact remains, that if you take a Core i7 8700K it will still beat Ryzen in CPU bound gaming situations (low resolutions or extremely high refresh rate where a game is not GPU bound). The difference and gap towards Intel are getting smaller though. Get yourself a nice G.Skill FlareX memory kit at 3200 MHz and you've covered your gaming bases. Keep in mind that a CPU bottleneck always has been far less important compared to a GPU bottleneck, which why I'll keep saying it, that differential is trivial at best. Honestly, with the money you save on this processor compared directly to the cheapest eight-core Intel processor you can find, you probably should invest in a faster graphics cards. 

DDR4 Memory

The latest firmware for both the older 300 chipsets series and the new 400 Chipset series including the X470 have matured and is an accumulation of DDR4 memory support that evolved when the original Ryzen series was released. Memory compatibility should not and likely will not be an issue as long as you stick to recently released DIMMs. I'll keep repeating this, but there are some really good Ryzen optimized kits out there. The G.Skill Flare X series at 3200 MHz CL14 is hitting a nice sweet-spot and is 100% stable + optimized for your Ryzen infrastructure. We also tested the new Ryzen Sniper X optimized kit from G.Skill, it runs 3400 MHz straight out of the box and will bring your memory bandwidth in the 50K rangers. However, take my advice:  Flare X at 3200 MHz CL14. Install it, activate the profile in the BIOS, restart ...  and never look back. 

Energy efficiency

With this processor now fabbed at 12nm TDP now has risen towards 105 Watts, that is a bit steep. Realistically, does anyone really care? I doubt it. A full PC at idle will sit in the 50 Watt range with a dedicated graphics card installed (GeForce GTX 1080 / 16 GB memory / SSD and the motherboard). When we stressed the processors with a Prime 1024M run we reached roughly 165 Watts. A threaded CB15 run, however, reveals close to 200 Watts of power consumption (for the entire PC). That certainly is on the high side. When we game we hover at 270~280 Watts, but obviously that factor is dependant on the type of game and graphics card you use of course. So yeah, it's all a notch higher with the 2700X for sure, it's up to you whether or not this is a relevant thing for your purchasing choices. Remember, this is a fully locked & loaded eight-core and 16-threads processor. 

The conclusion

The new X470 Aorus Gaming 7 feels a lot more solid compared to the initial Ryzen launch a year ago. In fact, we had no problems whatsoever. Pop in some compatible memory and you are good to go with the XMP profile. On the memory side of things, just go for G.Skill FlareX and you are set. You get two M2 slots, properly cooled (if you're worried about that, great aesthetics, some RGB, proper tweaking options, reinforced PCIe and DIMM slots. Yeah, it's pretty good huh? A nice motherboard for your high-end PC experience, including gaming. Nice to see is the default implementation of AC wifi. If you go down the multi-GPU route, then the cards will configure itself in x8 PCIe Gen 3.0 modus for two x16 slots. That's plenty of bandwidth, but we would have liked to have seen more PCIe Gen 3.0 lanes on that Ryzen processor series, sure. The X470 Aorus Gaming 7 is RGB LED configurable, and it looks great. Tweaking wise your can tweak quite well, but that tweaking process will be limited to what the processor can handle, which is 4.3 maybe 4.4 GHz.  It's a fantastic motherboard though, and once you have your tweak stabilized, your memory up and running you will not look back. Well, perhaps you do look back, as the Aorus Gaming 7 with its stunning looks is something you want to look at. The motherboard feels stable thanks to a really quality build with proper components used, it is mature and comes with a pretty decent UEFI BIOS as well. The Aorus Gaming 7 Wifi as such is a very nice high-end range product, and should surely be worth a consideration and our recommendation. 

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