The Gigabyte X870E Aorus Pro has an attractive design with minimal RGB lighting but plenty of attention to detail on its heatsink aesthetics to make this a head-turner of a motherboard. There's no doubt that it has the features to offer a home to all the components you'd want to install in a high-end gaming or content creation PC too as well as offering the usual perks of a current generation AMD motherboard, such as dual USB4 ports, Wi-Fi 7, PCIe Gen 5 support for graphics cards and SSDs. We don't think many will be left wanting from its specifications, except maybe if you need more than four SATA ports or want to use multiple PCIe Gen 5 SSDs. Even with the former you have additional PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 3 slots for expansion cards.

There are plenty of other great inclusions too. You get power and reset buttons, an LED POST code display, two thermistor inputs for thermal probes, heatpipe-linked VRM heatsinks and even an HDMI port at the front of the board for powering case screens. You'll be able to tap into higher speeds and power on the front panel Type-C port too thanks to USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 support. Being a somewhat premium board in the current generation, you get all the latest EZ features that make building your PC easier too, such as tool-free M.2 ports and heatsinks across all ports, a PCIe push-button release and screwless single-piece WI-Fi antenna.

Then of course you have to consider whether you actually need an X870E motherboard. There may be features aside from additional bandwidth that tempt you, but ultimately, the main reason you should be considering this board is the ability to power multiple M.2 SSDs and offer several PCIe slots, with only a minimum of bandwidth sharing. Admittedly, that comes at the expense of part of one of its headline features in PCIe Gen 5 M.2 support, given two of its three PCIe Gen 5 M.2 ports share bandwidth with your graphics card, but you can still use the top slot and a PCIe Gen 4 SSD at the same time with no cost to your graphics card in addition to having additional PCIe slots for further expansion too.

Looking higher up the food chain, and you'll get the option to use multiple PCIe Gen 5 SSDs at the same time, front panel Type-C ports with uprated power capabilities, boosted aesthetics including more RGB lighting and uprated CPU power delivery. A lot of that will be superfluous to most users, but the Gigabyte X870E Aorus Pro finds itself somewhere between the more affordable $200-250 boards than can handle a single PCIe Gen 5 SSD and those aforementioned ones that will leave a sizeable dent in your wallet, for example the ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero or the X870E Aorus Master, which currently costs around $110 more.

At more affordable price points, the drop isn't nearly as bad as it is from say $250 to around $200. There you start to see many features heavily downgraded or even vanish entirely such as USB4, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, EZ features, adequate cooling for PCIe Gen 5 SSDs with downgrades to audio codecs fairly common. Compared to the likes of the Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite Wi-Fi 7 or MSI MAG B850 Tomahawk Max Wi-Fi that both offer $100 or more in savings, the Gigabyte X870E Aorus Pro struggles to justify its higher price tag, especially compared to its cheaper Aorus sibling, which really only loses out on RGB lighting, a couple of layout-related niggles and extra PCIe bandwidth, but realistically anyone with a graphics card and up to two M.2 SSDs, so long as one of those is PCIe Gen 4 or slower, won't have any need for that extra bandwidth.

The Gigabyte X870E Aorus Pro builds on the solid platforms that are its lower end X870 models, offering a decent specification for the price and significantly undercuts more premium models we're fond of including the ASRock X870E Taichi and MSI MPG X870E Carbon Wi-Fi. However, those boards offer more wow factor, while the Gigabyte X870E Aorus Pro doesn't really do the same compared to the boards that sit well below it. As a result the likes of the Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite Wi-Fi 7 are much better value unless the increased PCIe bandwidth provided by this X870E-equipped board and the expansion options that provides are dealbreakers.