First GIGABYTE Aorus Branded Motherboard Teased, probably Z270

[btarunr]

Back in early November it was reported that GIGABYTE is planning to open a new front against rivals ASUS Republic of Gamers and MSI Gaming, with Aorus-branded motherboards and graphics cards, in 2017. The company appears to be ready with the motherboards. A teaser pic posted on its Facebook page reveals at least one enthusiast-segment socket LGA1151 motherboard, which is likely based on the Intel Z270 Express chipset. The few features that stand out are four PCI-Express x16 slots (of which two could be wired to the Z270 chipset and electrical x4, given the chipset's 4 additional PCIe downstream lanes); a smattering of RGB LEDs all over the board, and premium overclocking features.

Update (09/12): Here are some of the first press-shots, courtesy of VideoCardz. Apparently GIGABYTE decided to keep its conventional naming scheme.



Many Thanks to Chaitanya for the tip.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[RejZoR]

I don't understand the point of Z170 and Z270 crazy overclocking features when Intel CPU's are already clocked so high you can't really make any decent overclocks. You gain like what, 400MHz. That's like fart against a hurricane. Overclocking makes sense only when you make at least 1GHz difference or more.

 

[EarthDog]

Not sure what crazy features you are talking about... 95% aren't needed anyway. That said, you can get 500-700 mhz out of 6700k, but you are looking at 1ghz+ with 6600k...

 

[birdie]

Intel should have just skipped Kaby Lake.

There's no point in this CPU or the 200 series chipset for 99% of users out there.

 

[ensabrenoir]

Intel should have just skipped Kaby Lake.

There's no point in this CPU or the 200 series chipset for 99% of users out there.

.....truth be told there is no need for 100% of this rgb/gaming/water cooled/tempered glass/cpu & gpu epeen market for the average consumer..... but aint it cool though....

 

[Parn]

More money wasted on useless bells & whistles... Why can't they just stick to the good old UD series, making it more stable and affordable?

 

[peche]

Intel should have just skipped Kaby Lake.

There's no point in this CPU or the 200 series chipset for 99% of users out there.

its part of the new process: architecture - process - and couldnt remember the 3rd lol... but yes its completely unnecessary...they could give a year moar to skylake... for develop and let the poeple enjoy new generation .... amd still on AM3+

Regards,

 

[bogami]

GIGABYTE does not require any front against ASUS ROG Gaming and MSI since both are not able to offer nearly as good motherboard GIGABAYTE hev . G1 which it is higher grade and only motherboard ASUS Workstation Z170 comes near but not quite in quality and offered yet this disappeared with offers on the official site of ASUS ! Yes GIGABAYTE ther is no need for fear only to continue with the Z270 chipset and several LEDs can not replace the lack of PLX chip.

 

[MxPhenom 216]

GIGABYTE does not require any front against ASUS ROG Gaming and MSI since both are not able to offer nearly as good motherboard GIGABAYTE hev . G1 which it is higher grade and only motherboard ASUS Workstation Z170 comes near but not quite in quality and offered yet this disappeared with offers on the official site of ASUS ! Yes GIGABAYTE ther is no need for fear only to continue with the Z270 chipset and several LEDs can not replace the lack of PLX chip.

Gigabyte boards being sooo much better than Asus and MSI is far from the truth. Maybe Asus but not MSI.

 

[DNLB42]

Hmmmmmm, I must be missing something here. It is aimed at enthusiasts and the average consumer is not happy because of the enthusiast features it is packed with. "Packed" being the key word here.
Wearing my "average Joe" hat, WHAT A WASTE.
Wearing my "enthusiast" hat, HOT DANG!!!!
I have never been a fan of Gigabyte products, other than their laptops. BUT, I have always been a fan of Aorus. Especially their laptops. I'm torn since I consider myself an "average" Dr Jekyl, "enthusiast" Mr Hyde.
My point is this.
I like!!! Time for a new desktop DIY build with all the enthusiastic vigor I can muster. And since I am rocking an average Joe beer gut, I can muster a hell of a whole lot.
Did I mention that I love it!!!

 

[TheLostSwede]

Sadly Gigabyte's BIOS/UEFI team has been slipping badly over the past few years and their new UEFI for the Z170 boards is a horrible, horrible turd. It looks worse than ASRock's Fatality boards in a similar colour scheme and it's unstable as could be. It takes forever for my system to get the post screen and ever so often, the system won't turn on. XMP doesn't work properly and the board can't see my NVMe drive for whatever reason, even though it has an option for NVMe drives in the UEFI. Gigabyte has also been really quick at dropping support for older boards as soon as a new range is out, even though the old boards still had stability issues. Not going for Gigabyte for my next purchase, that's for sure.

 

[Arnulf]

Sadly Gigabyte's BIOS/UEFI team has been slipping badly over the past few years and their new UEFI for the Z170 boards is a horrible, horrible turd. It looks worse than ASRock's Fatality boards in a similar colour scheme and it's unstable as could be. It takes forever for my system to get the post screen and ever so often, the system won't turn on. XMP doesn't work properly and the board can't see my NVMe drive for whatever reason, even though it has an option for NVMe drives in the UEFI. Gigabyte has also been really quick at dropping support for older boards as soon as a new range is out, even though the old boards still had stability issues. Not going for Gigabyte for my next purchase, that's for sure.

Must be something with your configuration.

My Z170M-D3H runs my memory (using its 2666 MT/s XMP profile) just fine and I am using Samsung 950 Pro NMVe as the primary (boot&application) drive. There was some initial confusion as to whether the NVMe drive was detected or not before installing the OS but I figured things out after about 5 minutes - this being my first system with a NVMe drive ...

Also don't see any crashes in BIOS, ever. Your symptoms point to what is mostlikely a faulty PSU.

 

[Chaitanya]

So 2 different Aorus motherboards have been leaked so far. Also Gigabyte has a giveaway on their Aorus page for EU citizen signing up for Aorus product news.

 

[buildzoid]

So this is supposed to compete with ROG?

It does that in the looks department I guess but I'll be surprised if it also packs all the LN2 OC specific features that ROG mobos have.

 

[xpredator_13]

my dear lord...those RGB...what a madness are we into? STOP THE RGB MADNESS!!!!!!

 

[TheLostSwede]

Must be something with your configuration.

My Z170M-D3H runs my memory (using its 2666 MT/s XMP profile) just fine and I am using Samsung 950 Pro NMVe as the primary (boot&application) drive. There was some initial confusion as to whether the NVMe drive was detected or not before installing the OS but I figured things out after about 5 minutes - this being my first system with a NVMe drive ...

Also don't see any crashes in BIOS, ever. Your symptoms point to what is mostlikely a faulty PSU.

Yes, of course my PSU is broken when the RAM works fine at 2666MHz and even 3000MHz if I set it manually, but not using XMP. The NVMe drive works just fine, it just doesn't show up under the settings options in the latest UEFI, but I guess you're not using that one?

 

[Furbacca]

Why can't we have at least one decent motherboard manufacturer that makes decent boards? We need proper UEFI/BIOS documentation, it's features and what commands does the UEFI bios support. Proper list of changes in BIOS update/revisions and not just "Improvements".

I'd like to see TPM header's on all boards. (can use usb stick) Most expensive ASUS board doesn't have this feature. My old GigaByte Z77X-UD3H has it. Has a proper UEFI 2.3.1+ Support but lacks UEFI definition EFI_STORAGE_SECURITY_COMMAND_PROTOCOL which means i cannot enable hardware accelerated drive encryption within the drive itself. There is no documentation about that anywhere, trial and error.

Also what's with the quality from ASUS lately? I had plastic casing around onboard USB headers come off when unplugging internal cable? I have never experienced that with old motherboards, even from ASUS. Motherboard manufacturers need to up their game seriously on Customer Service, Features, Quality of components, Documentation etc. When was last time sonic studio got update from ASUS on z170 line? Never! I had to uninstall the software since it was conflicting with many others and the OS itself.