"Overpriced and Disappointing" could be a name of last few years in PC industry.

At $1,300, that plastic cable cover shouldn't be plastic. At $1,300 you can afford to have that thing made from metal.

I think Gigabyte made this board just to make their Tachyon and Master look like good deals!!!!

For a board that price, I'd expect PCIe switches for dual x16 slots or a full uncut x16 slot with multiple PCIe 5 M.2 slots.

I was expecting the "7-degree difference" to be tested by simply taping over the holes (because I assumed it's compared to not having them there), but if even pulling the air forcibly results in only 2 degrees... Yeah.

Love how technical he is then calls the air duct an air thing lol legend

Imagine how much simpler life would be without a glass side panel on your case.

I have made a review of an Z790 Elite X and made extended ram overlocking tests, and making a review of a Pro X and I could only get to 7600 Mhz manual overlock with 2x16 GB, the entire X lineup (including Xtreme and Master) is identical in terms of memory performance. They are better than previous non X boards in terms of memory, but only 400-600 mhz better. Do not expect anything more than 7200-7400 xmp, maybe 7600 xmp if you have 2x24 gb. Marketed 8266 - manual overlock with 2x24 with best cpu memory controller possible. People need to stop buying these stupid fast 7800+ memory kits and expect them to work. You need and APEX or Tachyon for those.

The fact these boards are more expensive than HEDT boards used to be is insane

Ill be honest. I was foolish for buying an ROG Crosshair X670E Hero for $700. However, it had the connectivity that I really wanted. With that being said, that was an insane price to pay for a motherboard. $1300 is unfathomable. I mean, WTF?!

I always love your directness and honest options and then the facts to back those options up.. Great review, not so great product.

i was on the fence getting this board, thanks you saved me a lot of money

Even Sheik is exhausted by the review outcome

The board has to be using the iGPU to mirror the dGPU in order for Thunderbolt to actually work which means a simple DP-ALT to DP adapter should work if you want to use the iGPU for an actual display.

Thanks for your honest reviews! I wish these BIG companies would not lie as much to the consumers as they do now!

Lissen, never change the intro with the cat on display! I love ittttt 🐱

Buying a motherboard for the price of a cheap car and still getting that Norton bullshit is a spit in the face

It's a $1300 board, I'd expect a proper fully coloured manual

Hearing you paying for review materials and giving honest feedback is refreshing bro 🤙🏻

Thank you for this very detailed review! 🙏😊

huge respect to you for calling Bullshit when you see it. You have earned a lot of trust over the years because you say it as it is. Appreciate all you do for us mere mortals.

Competely agree on the disappointment with Gigabyte software. It takes away massively from the "perfection enjoyment" of my primary build (an X570, not this board, but still). Thank you, as always for your honesty and not talking down to your audience. Cheers

this video has been more informative then almost all the videos ive seen all year. oh and im sure the 7 degree difference is the amount of heat the lcd display and i/o adds to the overall system temp and by having those holes directly under the lcd display helps to rid the system of most of the heat emitted by the display and i/o

thnx for the clear and balanced review. from the moment you showed the box contents onwards the whole thing just seemed half finished, like an early prototype :-(

Thank you for this review. I had seriously considered this board. After seeing your review, I would NEVER consider it. The biggest issue was the nvme drives along with other downsides. I am very satisfied with the build I chose: ASRock Z790 PG-ITX/TB4 Intel LGA1700 Mini-ITX Mainboard ($334.99) in a Fractal Torrent Nano with a 13900K and 8tb Samsung 990 Pro. The entire build is really tight, but works really well. There are only 2 memory slots, which makes better sense given the channels provided. Your in depth reviews are very much appreciated and have made a significant difference for me.

The CR23 unstable is probably caused by the very low CPU core voltage on this motherboard. My ROG APEX ENCORE with the i9-14900K consumes nearly 400W when running CR23 by default, and with adaptive mode at -0.055V and LLC 4, it consumes 380W. When I undervolt to -0.1V, I encounter the same error as you did in this video.

0:07 I see you have a helper kitty, always ready to give a helping paw lol

i think the product i really want to see is your own individual take on the framework 16 laptop. (which unfortunately... does not have nvvidia gpu option). but just in all other respects from the product design. and how much further it can be taken. the reason i request this product review: its because gaming laptops are actually pretty notorious for dying with dead gpu (or cpu, whatever else). and once broken they cannot be fixed in any economical or serviceable fashion. and anyhow this laptop also has other nice customization features, and other types of servicing or expansion / component replacement.

I miss the days of a Motherboard costing £250/£300 being high end and now you don't even get all the features at that price point which is just sad

be cool to see a video on the process of how memory gets on the QVL, especially the high end kits.

Couple of notes, 1. You have display output via the USB-C / TB4 ports for onboard/iGPU video 2.a. Most of the USB-A ports are using a Realtek USB HUB 2.b. Most of the internal USB 3.x ports are on hubs, likely also Realtek... 3.a. The 2.5GB eth port is Intel 226v (good) 3.b. The 10GB port is AQC107 multi-gig capable (meh Gen3 PCI-E, the newer AQC113CS supports Gen4, but these chipsets sometimes have disconnect issues unless you disable a lot of features) 4.a. Only 1 M.2 slot supports SATA, they all support x2, or x4 lane PCI-E 4.b. Only 1 M.2 slot appears to be dedicated 4 lane and not shared, (the one mentioned in the video below the top PCI-E slot) 4.c. All other M.2 slots (excluding the Gen5 above top PCI-E and Gen4 dedicated immediately below top PCI-E slot) share the total bandwidth of the Z790 chipset, which includes the 2.5GB nic, 10GB NIC, Thunderbolt ports, WiFi, lower PCI-E x16(x4 lane), etc. This is essentially 8 lanes of PCI-E Gen 4 bandwidth (x8 DMI 4.0) 5. The TB4 ports effectively share PCI-E lanes with some of the Gen 4 M.2 slots(lowest 3) and the lower PCI-E x16 slot (x4 lane slot), lan/wifi,etc. see below Gigabyte does not define what is switched with what other than the top PCI-E slot in their manual. Z790 should have as many as 28 lanes available (20x Gen4, 8x Gen3) The lowest 3x M.2 slots running off the z790 chipset are all using x4 Lanes of Gen4 (x12 of 20 available lanes from the z790) The Gigabyte manual lists only the devices hanging off the Gen3 bus, with a total of 12x lanes potentially used of x8 available, wifi (x1 lane), 2.5Gb LAN (x1 lane), 10Gb lan (x2 lanes), TB4 controller (x4 lanes) and the lower PCI-E slot (x4 lanes) So if you want to use TB4, you might have to leave the lower PCI-E slot vacant? bad lane mappings on gigabytes part (some of these devices could have hung off the Gen4 lanes instead of Gen3 lanes This board seems WAY overpriced for some possible issues it brings with USB hubs and possibly misguided PCI-E lane utilization

I’m pretty sure I’ve had 200 euro motherboards coming with more toys and accessories than that 😢

I am truly blown away by this outcome, who could have guessed paying 1300$ for a motherboard could end up as ill advised use of your money? Truly life changing revelations.

25:40 'Marketing bullshit..' That had me in stitches 😂. Great video as always.

Finally someone that reviewed this board with detail

That small vent hole claim seems to be just something done to add to the feature set for the sake of having extra things on it. There's not much of a chance the average user will ever verify the claim, or that they will dispute it either.

Hey Roman, hope you are well. Do you have any updates on how your AM5 IHS/waterblock is coming along and if you will ever sell them? I hope it's ready for (and compatible with) Zen 5 as I'd love to get one. Thanks 🙂

Would you ever consider testing MSI GODLIKE and ACE Z790 MAX? I'm mostly interested in knowing if there are any designs changes to the iGPU side things.

Just noticed your stargate address tattoo. Thats awesome

The USB DAC could, in theory, add up-to a couple hundred dollars to the cost, but there ain't no way they're actually including a $200 DAC in the box. Oh, I like that! DAC in the box!

Is there any motherboard over $4-500 which is not overpriced?

I'm still running an older Aorus Z370 board and it has a small fan under the IO shield but according to HWInfo it never runs it but they could have done that here although there isn't much of the way of vents to exhaust any air.

I love motherboards that come with real time raytracing. Very shine, much reflection. That quick release on the top pcie slot, positioned directly under my massive gpu though.

I wonder how the screen will hold up with that decent looking VRM heatsink dumping heat into its rear. Those vent holes look like a necessity.

If you're doing custom watercooling and you want to add an extra NVME drive you need to disassemble the whole thing... They could have cut-outs for each NVME drive where you cover it with a copper/aluminum block, ideally with a heatpipe to take the heat to a finstack at the front. Or at a minimum, don't cover it in plastic. On the VRM most of the finstacks are blocked by plastic, that's a waste.

Could the capacitor to the right of the CPU socket interfere with the mounting of some coolers or water blocks like the ones from EK?

Aorus Z790 Extreme Disappoint X

Motherboards are so expensive these days, even the lower end options are so expensive now. Gone are the days you could get a good boad for £60. I like the more industrial look anyway, just all black is preferable like my old MSI X99 SLI Plus motherboard. I also like Crucial memory, the cheap shit that's just green.

Really good video!!

Another excellent review.

There are "some" advantages to Gigabyte motherboards as well as disadvantages. The one thing I do not like is the way they treat Bios updates. Too many times they put out a Beta bios(the ones followed by a letter designation like F4a vs simply F4) and those beta bios's seem to last forever until they release a final "official" bios. At least that is my experience with AMD motherboards.

$300 board + $1000 plastic. That's some expensive plastic! If you want a screen, just get an Asrock board, these integrate eDP (laptop internal displayport) and you can get many size/dimensions/resolutions screens for this (and for cheap), and then it just acts as a display hooked up to the iGPU, so you can display anything you like independent from any manufacturer software. There are some nice casemods with this.

That motherboard looks crazy good!

Ei, when can we get our hands on that Thermal Grizzly High Performance AM5 Heatspreader? Really want to do a build with it!

oh man, just opening the lid!. At that price I was thinking "That looks like a 299 MSI board package... this isn't going to go well. Nothing in proper packing, it's just baggies." Also.. the paper manual isn't an issue, it bio degrades and most paper is from sustainable forests now.The issue is all those plastic baggies, that's enough microplastics to make billions of plastinated worms. Also.. that acrylic sheeted motherboard. Ugh. That's going to be scratch hell inside of an hour, and then to make it better it's all plastic. Ugh. oh boy.Also, If I'm paying over a grand for a motherboard, I DO NOT WANT SHOVELWARE ON THE INSTALLER! Good to see Gigabyte is as trash as they've consistently been for the last decade or so. But right down to the shovelware and typos, it just shows that not only does Gigabyte not respect their customers, they actively view them with contempt. That level of nonsense at that price point is past bad, it's insulting. The PCB might be built rugged, but I have had 3 GPUs and 2 Motherboards of theirs fail in the last 10 years. By comparison, I lost 1 ASUS GPU(and that was when a power transformer down the road blew, so.. not sure I can blame ASUS) and 2 ASROCK motherboards. Both ASROCKs were replaced no questions asked. I have never been able to get a refund from a Gigabyte board. Ever. I have had one MSI board lose use of 2 DIMM slots, but it's still running fine today with 2 dimms, and since I only used 2 for overclocking, it didn't matter, and took me a year to realize 2 slots were no good.

Imagine doing a bios update on that board then the power goes out. 😬

I got one of the X570X Pro AX boards and gott im himmel it was baaaaaaad, and so is the software. The fans would go Crazy after a reboot.

Hood review, that said which of the Z790 Refresh motherboards would you generally recommend? Especially the lighter coloured ones.

My "AORUS elite" x570 was a big disappointment as well, barely any fan headers which I didn't even imagine could be a thing on something supposed to be "elite" LOL

The 'top' M.2 slot's clear advantage is its accessibility especially for those who are using Water Blocks that are covering access to every single other M.2 slot. I'd much rather lose 0% to 2% then have to drain and completely 100% disassemble my water cooling to access M.2 slots. Generally, the most expensive are out of the MSI Godlike or ASUS ROG Extreme Glacial. My takeaway of the Gigabyte Aorus is .. I like the top cover for the CPU pin area and I like that they right angle side mounted the USB Type E header. Let's be real, none of the software for any of these motherboard manufacturers is any good.

Scathing review! I like it.

Thumbs up for the temp-percent analysis. -bZj

I’ve been using gygabite motherboards for years now and I’m currently using the Z690 Aorus elite , the hardware has always been top quality but the problem is the software , for example there are several bios updates and quick ones that Gygabite does and kudos to them, but the control center, RGB fusion ( even for the Graphics cards) always has issues and is absolutely terrible compared to other manufacturers I have no doubt that if Gygabite invest in better software development they would achieve much better confidence from consumers

😆 my z790 Aorus Master was disappointing for $500. It should be a $300 motherboard imo. The absurdly priced boards like the Xtreme are ridiculous, shouldn’t even exist.

off topic, sorry. what is that eink tablet u used at the end? the one with the summary points on it

Thanks for being real and calling out these companies BS man. More people should do this so maybe one day we have a better market

It is hard not to be overpriced and disappointing as a mobo when you cost 1.3k USD.

This is what I've been wondering in relation to the (over)pricing of the current mobos. With AMD, some said that the manufacturers want to get as much money as possible since AM5 supposedly has a long platform life. That I can slightly understand. However, what's up with Intel's case. This is basically the eol of the socket/platform. So what's the reason or excuse for this one?

I got the Aorus X Wifi7 and its been good with the exception of no wifi or BT driver support in windows 10. My G.Skill 7800 cl36 kit wont run at XMP, but runs great at 7600 CL38... Proc is a 14700k.

I have the AORUS Z670E Master with the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D and I have to say it was not cheap but I'm very happy with the cooling and how well it runs and so far, have had no issues. These boards are expensive but compared to lots of cheaper brands etc. you do really get much more but it's always up to the user's needs. I think these high-end boards from Aorus are also meant to be futureproof. On another note, I'm running a RTX 3090Ti should I update to 4000 series or just wait? cheers.

Ah the *RENT* motherboard 😅

I literally bought my car for 200-300 euro less. That board is worth something like $1900 CAD and I bought my car for $1600 CAD and I've been driving it every day since 2019. I doubt that board will get support for 4 years. I bought a second car as a parts car for $850 CAD.

Hello Roman! I wish you a happy new Year. I own a 14600K and I want to buy a relatively affordable Z790 motherboard. I find it hard to chose among the Asus Z790 TUF PRO WIFI, the Msi Tomahawk Max and the Gigayte Z790 Aorus Elite X WIFI 7. Which one would you suggest?

This will probably be the 100th comment about this, but your cat is cute af. Video is solid too (as usual).

conclusion: A very expensive motherboard doesn`t make your cpu faster :P

This is not about the motherboard or gigabytes practices etc, but more the point to your tools and supplies, is there somewhere where I can find a link to your shop so that I can find the CPU bracket etc? Or is it all through patreon?

Der8auer... can you do a video where you put thermal paste in between the heat-spreader and the chip? I'm curious as to how much of an effect this would have on the heat of the chip.

What is the difference with the new contact frame? Did not know he had a new one.

even AsRock has done the swappable m.2 positions on top slot with their Z790 Steel Legend which cost like 1/4 of this board, one side to run at PCIe 5.0 shared so the GPU will run at x8 and the other one is PCIe 4.0 but it'll leave the GPU to run at full x16 lanes

Hello, I’m about to buy a motherboard for my new build. It’s the only missing part. I have the 14900K CPU and 4090 RTX VGA. I know I wouldn’t be able to afford the Extreme X. Actually I was considering getting the Aorus Master X. You also mentioned so many times buying it instead of Xtreme. Master also has 10gbit Lan but it lacks Thunderbolt ports (though we can add them later with add-in cards I think.) Also I see it’s sound chip isn’t the latest one but overall I find it very appealing. Some reveiwers really like it but some are also a little bit disaapointing for some reasons. I also have the option to get Asus Maximus Dark Hero which is a peer of the Master X I believe. But it doesn’t have 10gbit Lan port but it does have 2x Thunderbold connections. I don’t know which one to get. Should I sacrifice the 10gb lan port or the thınderbolt ports which I don’t really know if I’ll ever need :) I hope you can give me some ideas. And maybe MSI ACE would be good too lacking the 10gbit lan port again. I tend to come to Master X which has 10gbit lan port and I can always add Thunderport add-in card later. But I don’t know how stable it is with its 14900 profiles and how easy to make customization with its softeares. Could anyone please give some suggestions? Thank you.

Nowadays there's a real issue in high-end pricing in IT. They keep charging premium prices for averages MB. With that kind of price/quality ratio we pay more for the marketing staff (lies) than for the product itself. What they don't know (or don't care about) is a flagship product tells a lot about how a company see his consumers. If a companie neglect or scam premium consumers, they'll do the same or worse for average consumers. Thanks for your review, I'm grateful there are people to show us what really looks like those flagships

105 A stages x 22 stages ? Holy crap, this gives 2 310 Amperes ! with a tension of 1,25 Volts, that would give 2 887,5 Watts ! I think you could light a whole house with those VRMs !

my universal audio rack gear needs thunderbolt 3 or above is there another board you would recommend over this one for 14900k 4090. thank you and good video

if you tape over the io shield holes, could that be a way to test the 7°C drop claim?

Yeah you're right about that the heat sink for this price it should make perfect contact with the IC's

Only 4 SATA connectors for that price!? So if all the manufacturers (Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, ASRock) make errors with manufacturing and software and laugh at your warranty problems who can I trust to purchase? A fantastic review, well done

Just to point out I've tried OCIng DDR4 on a couple of gigabyte boards. Micron Rev E is what I used at the time, it does 4200CL16 on Asus Z390 and Z490 boards. On gigabyte boards I couldn't even boot it with stock XMP of 3200CL16. I currently use Micron Rev B, on 10900K it did 4533CL15, currently on my 4th alder / raptor lake CPU, I have a 14900KF running 4400CL15 G1 stable on an MSI MAG tommahawk, also it can do 4300CL14. The rest of the timings are crap because micron, but even for DDR5 Gigabyte boards are trash tier. Only board thats reliable for high end DDR5 OCing is Asus Apex, DDR4 you can do on just about any Z690 or Z790 D4 board from Asus or MSI. I bought the Rev B micron on EOL sales, originally £350 (lol) reduced to £180 when 4800 DDR5 still cost £400, so now I'm too stubborn to bother with DDR5.

Micro Center in the US has this for $999. Still expensive but quite a bit less than $1300.

Please never forget everything is to do with timing. That is the super power everything has.

Wait why does the first M.2 slot share lanes with the PCIE slot? I mean I have a 990 Pro which is a Gen4 NVME and an RTX 3080 in my system and they do not share lanes, I am on AM4 with a 5800X3D. Both my GPU and NVME work at their max allocated lanes. Why is this different for Gen5?

This, is one of the best tech channels and Its a true mystery why it has so few subscribers. On the board... that board should cost at the very most 700bucks, considering the plastic on it, the useless screen and the BS promises. These days all vendors they just pull a price-tag out of the bottom.

Are those ports really thunderbolt, or are they USB 4 misleadingly labeled with the thunderbolt symbol?

You need to reinstall the GCC to making it work. But im not sure about editing the lcd display.

The Hetzner server-farm in Finland is not in Helsinki but in Tuusula.

You mentioned the Aorus Master X not being much different from the Aorus Xtreme X. I was also looking at the Aorus Master vs the Aorus Master X and it was another thing that seemed really strange to me. I couldn't see any real difference between them except the increased price of the Master X haha. Edit: I looked through every line of the specifications on each and the only two differences I saw was the *claimed* support for DDR5-8266 vs DDR5-8000 and the use of integrated WiFi 7 vs 6E. Those two meaningless differences cost $100??

It looks almost exactly like my Aorus Elite b660 board I paired with a 12700 (which I like, lots of connectivity, zero stability issues), minus the excessively large LCD IO shield, and that was like $200. For less than $1300 I could buy a good AM5/Z790 board and a 7800x3D or 14700. It is a nice looking board, but for that price you can basically get a high end board/CPU/cooler AND some ddr5 cl30 RAM, if not more with a combo board/CPU/memory deal.

Probably the heatsink was so suffocated by the screen that opening just 5 small holes releases a lot of heat? It would have been easier to cover the holes with tape to see if the temperatures rose up.

thank you sir🙏

What are the best high end motherboard options in the market for 2 ram slot motherboards?

Which case will accommodate a 3.5 wide GPU in the bottom slot ?