GIGABYTE Z490 Aorus Master Motherboard Review: Clawing at the Competition

Conclusion

Going back to a saying I've regularly held onto that 'no two motherboards are the same,' GIGABYTE's Z490 Aorus Master has made great strides forward compared to its predecessor, the GIGABYTE Z390 Aorus Master, which we reviewed back in 2019. For Intel's Comet Lake platform, GIGABYTE has adopted a more clean-cut and sleeker aesthetic, with just enough RGB LED lighting not to overpower the design, but has plenty of room for expansion. Changing the design entirely and amalgamating the M.2 heatsinks into the chipset instead of straight-edged styling, there's no doubt that the Z490 Aorus Master looks as premium as its controller set suggests.

There's plenty to tackle on the feature set, with three full-length PCIe 3.0 slots with compatibility users looking to use multiple add-in cards. Omitting any PCIe 3.0 x1 slots and instead opting for a cleaner look throughout, users can still install expansion cards such as sound cards and additional controllers into these slots. GIGABYTE also offers a premium Intel-based networking pairing, led by its i225-V 2.5 GbE controller and AX201 Wi-Fi 6 pairing, which is likely to be the standard for motherboards going into 2020 and beyond. It's somewhat a shame that we don't see 5 GbE on a board at this price point, with GIGABYTE clearly funneling that value into the power delivery instead.

For storage, users can install up to three PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe drives for blisteringly fast storage, and those looking to use the more conventional SATA based drives can benefit from six SATA ports. Each M.2 slot has its own stylish M.2 heatsink, which is more than expected for a board of this pedigree. One of the Z490 Aorus Master's major highlights comes via the rear panel, with ten USB connectors including three USB 3.2 G2 Type-A, one USB 3.2 G2 Type-C, two USB 3.2 G1 Type-A, and four USB 2.0 ports. Users with oodles of USB devices that find this not to be satisfactory can add seven ports through the use of internal headers, including one USB 3.2 G2 Type-C header.

In our performance testing, the GIGABYTE Z490 Aorus Master does well in our computational and gaming benchmarks and a very competitive showing in our system benchmarks. The GIGABYTE boots into Windows pretty quickly, with solid power consumption figures, as well as solid DPC latency performance. 

When it came to overclocking, the GIGABYTE strolled through our testing, which was expected due to previous experience with others in its Z490 series. We saw good VDroop control throughout our testing when using GIGABYTE's default load-line calibration profile, with decent performance in our POV-Ray benchmark testing. The GIGABYTE Z490 Aorus Master uses a premium 14-phase power delivery with 90 A power stages, with a robust heatsink, which puts it as one of the best Z490 boards we've tested when it comes to VRM thermals.

When comparing the GIGABYTE Z490 Aorus Master ($390) to the competition, all of the Z490 models in the $350 to 400 price bracket do well against ASRock's Z490 Taichi ($370) in our testing. For slightly more, it has some of the best mid-range aesthetics we've seen from a GIGABYTE model. With 2.5 GbE and Wi-Fi 6 networking capabilities, triple PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2, and support for up to 128 GB of DDR4-5000 memory out of the box, it's not a hard sell for its price. Even onboard audio is premium with a Realtek ALC1220-VB codec and ESS Sabre ES9118EQ DAC, which puts it as a solid all-round board in functionality and looking good while doing so. 

Final Words

Intel has already announced that its next generation Rocket Lake processors will launch sometime in Q1. While the GIGABYTE Z490 Aorus Master ($390) should eventually support the 11th generation processors, GIGABYTE also mentions PCIe 4.0 support, but only in the animations on its product web page. They have said that the design conforms to PCIe 4.0 specifications, which will be enabled when appropriate hardware is released. We expect some vendors to announce that their 400-series does support PCIe 4.0 with a BIOS update in that regard, as it does require some advance planning in the design phase.

It will be interesting to see where PCIe 4.0 support sits, as well as how many users will list it as a reason for upgrading, later in the year. Z490 Aorus Master users looking to upgrade into Rocket Lake will have to be on the lookout for appropriate firmware updates.