Thursday, August 22nd 2024
GIGABYTE Intros X870E AORUS Master Motherboard
GIGABYTE today debuted its AMD 800-series motherboards with the launch of the premium X870E AORUS Master. This will go on to be the company's second most premium product on this chipset, as the company is also planning the X870E AORUS Xtreme. The AORUS Master is still packed to the gills with everything this chipset has to offer, along with high-end onboard devices. The board is built in the ATX form-factor, and draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX and two 8-pin EPS power connectors. It offers a 16+2+2 phase digital VRM featuring 110 A power stages. The board is laid out on a premium 8-layer PCB. You get tall extruded aluminium heatsinks for the CPU VRM, and the topmost M.2 NVMe Gen 5 slot.
The AMD Socket AM5 is wired to four DDR5 DIMM slots that support up to 192 GB of dual-channel DDR5, at speeds of over DDR5-8000. It also puts out no less than three M.2 NVMe Gen 5 slots. Two of these are wired to the dedicated x4 interfaces from the AMD "Raphael" or "Granite Ridge" processor, while one of them subtracts 4 lanes from the board's PCI-Express 5.0 x16 PEG slot. The board's fourth M.2 NVMe slot is Gen 4, and wired to the chipset. The only other expansion slots are a couple of PCI-Express 4.0 x16 (electrical Gen 4 x1). Besides the M.2 slots, you get four SATA 6 Gbps ports completing the board's storage connectivity.
USB connectivity on the GIGABYTE X870E AORUS Master includes two 40 Gbps USB4 that include DisplayPort connectivity from the processor, four 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2, four 5 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 1, a two 5 Gbps USB 3.2 ports via a header, and a 20 Gbps USB-C front-panel header. Networking interfaces includes a 5 Gbps Ethernet driven by a Realtek RTL8251B, and a Qualcomm QCNCM865 WLAN controller that provides Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3.
The board's onboard audio solution uses a Realtek ALC1220 CODEC with audiophile-grade capacitors. This CODEC, in our opinion, is preferrable to something like the ALC4080, since it uses the HDA bus, compared to the USB 3.0 bus of the newer CODEC, and is more resilient to audio glitches caused by kernel tick mistiming with certain GPUs.
The company didn't reveal pricing.
The AMD Socket AM5 is wired to four DDR5 DIMM slots that support up to 192 GB of dual-channel DDR5, at speeds of over DDR5-8000. It also puts out no less than three M.2 NVMe Gen 5 slots. Two of these are wired to the dedicated x4 interfaces from the AMD "Raphael" or "Granite Ridge" processor, while one of them subtracts 4 lanes from the board's PCI-Express 5.0 x16 PEG slot. The board's fourth M.2 NVMe slot is Gen 4, and wired to the chipset. The only other expansion slots are a couple of PCI-Express 4.0 x16 (electrical Gen 4 x1). Besides the M.2 slots, you get four SATA 6 Gbps ports completing the board's storage connectivity.
The board's onboard audio solution uses a Realtek ALC1220 CODEC with audiophile-grade capacitors. This CODEC, in our opinion, is preferrable to something like the ALC4080, since it uses the HDA bus, compared to the USB 3.0 bus of the newer CODEC, and is more resilient to audio glitches caused by kernel tick mistiming with certain GPUs.
The company didn't reveal pricing.
51 Comments on GIGABYTE Intros X870E AORUS Master Motherboard
So maybe we get ahead in 4~5 years.
Also, I would use an m.2 adapter card in the second 16× slot.