Gigabyte Z390 AORUS Ultra Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts
We’ve been a fan of Gigabyte’s AORUS motherboard ever since they were first announced and the Z390 AORUS Ultra is no different. Their new design with the Z390 series is very eye catching with its black and silver color scheme and all of the RGB lighting (what the AORUS brand is known for of course!). I really like the attention to detail with these new boards too, like the model name of the M.2 heatsink.

For a Z390 motherboard you have all of the features you would expect, but Gigabyte has added a lot of extras on this board too. First you have three PCI-Express 3.0 x4 slots, all of which come with M.2 heatsinks that not only look great, but will help keep your M.2 drives nice and cool. The board comes equipped with 802.11ac WiFi + Bluetooth 5.0, which is a nice addon. Gigabyte has always used great audio components on their AORUS boards and on this board we have H-Fi grade WIMA FKP2 audio capacitors and Nichicon audio capacitors. You do get USB 3.1 gen 2 ports on this board, which you would expect from a Z390 board, but you get an internal header, which means you can easily connect a type-C connection on the front of your case.

When it comes to power delivery this board is completely solid with its 12+1 all digital power phase design. You get your normal 8-pin EPS connector, but there is an extra 4-pin to bring more stable power to your processor. Once thing that was really noticeable was that when we were overclocking our temperatures were much lower than on other boards. I think this has a lot to do with the power design and optimized CPU power delivery plane, which is larger than a traditional CPU power delivery plane and uses a 2x copper PCB. With that we were able to achieve an overclock of 5.1 GHz across all eight cores of our Core i9-9900K processor.

Gigabyte has updated their BIOS on the Z390 boards and the new EZ Mode is great for beginners, but if you want to dive deep into the BIOS everything is easy to find and you can make settings a favorite so they are even easier to find. Gigabyte’s EasyTune software is easy to use and tune your system within Windows. There are also quite a lot of other apps that Gigabyte offers to for this board too. Of course RGB control is done with Gigabyte’s RGB Fusion software, which is very easy to use.

Right now this board is selling for $244.99 at our favorite online retailer, which we feel is a good price based on all of the features the Z390 AORUS Ultra offers. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Gigabyte Z390 AORUS Ultra Motherboard a 9 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!

rating9 10 TC award recommended

Pros:
– Solid design
– 3 M.2 slots all of which have heatsinks
– 12+1 power phase design + optimized CPU power delivery plane
– Integrated I/O shield
– Great overclocking with excellent VRM cooling
– Updated BIOS is nice

Cons:
– A little expensive compared to other Z390 boards

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