GIGABYTE Z790 Aorus Xtreme Motherboard Review: Flagship Z790 With Impressive VRM Thermals

Board Features

The GIGABYTE Z790 Aorus Xtreme is a premium flagship E-ATX motherboard, which sits at the top of GIGABYTE's LGA1700 motherboard stack. GIGABYTE's Aorus brand typically caters to gamers and enthusiasts, but the Z790 Xtreme leans more towards the enthusiast scale in terms of features. Some of these features include one full-length PCIe 5.0 x16 slot and two full-length PCIe 3.0 slots that can operate at x4/x1.

As expected on a premium motherboard, GIGABYTE includes a large array of PCIe M.2 storage capabilities, including one PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 slot, three PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots, and one PCIe 4.0 x4/SATA M.2 slot. For conventional drives, four SATA ports support RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 arrays. In the top right-hand corner of the board are four memory slots capable of supporting up to DDR5-8000 (1DPC) and a total combined capacity of up to 192 GB.

Cooling support consists of ten 4-pin headers, one designated for a CPU fan, one for a water pump, four hybrid chassis and water pump 4-pin headers, and four for chassis fans.

Focusing on connectivity, the Z790 Aorus Xtreme has various inputs and outputs on the rear panel. This includes two Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports, which double up as DisplayPorts, and ten USB 3.2 G2 Type-A ports. Users can utilize a further USB 3.2 G2x2 Type-C port, four USB 3.2 G2 Type-A ports, and four USB 3.2 G1 Type-A ports through internal headers around the motherboard's edges. Also featured on the rear panel are two 3.5 mm audio jacks and an S/PDIF optical output powered by a Realtel ALC4082 HD audio codec and three ESS Sabre DAC chips.

The GIGABYTE Z790 Aorus Xtreme also has a premium networking array, which is spearheaded by a Marvell AQtion AQC107 10 GbE controller, with a second RJ45 port powered by an Intel I225-V 2.5 GbE controller. The board also has wireless capabilities through a Killer AX1690 Wi-Fi 6E CNVi, which supports BT 5.3 devices.

Test Bed

With some of the nuances with Intel's Raptor Lake processors, including the use of P and E-cores, our policy is to see if the system gives an automatic option to increase the power limits of the processor. If it does, we select the liquid cooling option. If it does not, we do not change the defaults.

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