The GIGABYTE B550I Aorus Pro AX Motherboard Review: All The Small Things
by Gavin Bonshor on December 7, 2020 10:00 AM ESTGaming Performance
For B550 we are running using Windows 10 64-bit with the 1909 update.
World of Tanks enCore
Albeit different to most of the other commonly played MMO or massively multiplayer online games, World of Tanks is set in the mid-20th century and allows players to take control of a range of military based armored vehicles. World of Tanks (WoT) is developed and published by Wargaming who are based in Belarus, with the game’s soundtrack being primarily composed by Belarusian composer Sergey Khmelevsky. The game offers multiple entry points including a free-to-play element as well as allowing players to pay a fee to open up more features. One of the most interesting things about this tank based MMO is that it achieved eSports status when it debuted at the World Cyber Games back in 2012.
World of Tanks enCore is a demo application for a new and unreleased graphics engine penned by the Wargaming development team. Over time the new core engine will implemented into the full game upgrading the games visuals with key elements such as improved water, flora, shadows, lighting as well as other objects such as buildings. The World of Tanks enCore demo app not only offers up insight into the impending game engine changes, but allows users to check system performance to see if the new engine run optimally on their system.
Grand Theft Auto V
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine under DirectX 11. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark. The in-game benchmark consists of five scenarios: four short panning shots with varying lighting and weather effects, and a fifth action sequence that lasts around 90 seconds. We use only the final part of the benchmark, which combines a flight scene in a jet followed by an inner city drive-by through several intersections followed by ramming a tanker that explodes, causing other cars to explode as well. This is a mix of distance rendering followed by a detailed near-rendering action sequence, and the title thankfully spits out frame time data.
F1 2018
Aside from keeping up-to-date on the Formula One world, F1 2017 added HDR support, which F1 2018 has maintained; otherwise, we should see any newer versions of Codemasters' EGO engine find its way into F1. Graphically demanding in its own right, F1 2018 keeps a useful racing-type graphics workload in our benchmarks.
Aside from keeping up-to-date on the Formula One world, F1 2017 added HDR support, which F1 2018 has maintained. We use the in-game benchmark, set to run on the Montreal track in the wet, driving as Lewis Hamilton from last place on the grid. Data is taken over a one-lap race.
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meacupla - Tuesday, December 8, 2020 - link
yup, that's exactly what happens.The only remaining fix I could think of was replacing the soldered in BIOS chips
star-affinity - Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - link
Just wanted to say that my problems was resolved with a new power supply! So now the Gigabyte motherboard is working fine again, believe it or not. :)duploxxx - Tuesday, December 8, 2020 - link
not to mention cold boot - bios resets - unable to save q-fan profiles etc...I was very impressed by the x370 although it lacked some easy visual design.
The x570 gigabyte is not worth the money, would stay away from it as much as possible.
I also own an Asrock B450 board, a much better bios layout.
Dug - Tuesday, December 8, 2020 - link
Strange. I have Gigabyte going back to p965 with no issue.No issue with my x570 aorus pro wifi like you describe either, like thousands of others.
kkilobyte - Tuesday, December 8, 2020 - link
I - and others - have zero idea on what is triggering the issue. There is clearly something fishy going on with the power distribution on the Aorus X570, but so far, it was not possible to pinpoint the origin of it. ErP, USB load, PSU, DisplayPort, Sleep modes, RAM modules all have been suspected, but none of those elements led to anything conclusive. There is a +20 pages thread on hardforum.com about it. I tried to probe the issue with my scope, but it happens completely randomly; so far, it happened to me 3 times in about 8 months, and last time it happened, I was in a hurry and couldn't test.Doing a CMOS reset through the jumper doesn't solve the issue; it could thus mean that it is not a cmos-ram corruption, but a more fundamental electrical issue. My best bet is that somehow a power spike at shutdown is sometimes high enough to wrongly toggle a signal line that 'locks' one of the components kept alive by the battery.
Finding the solution would require identifying the components that are kept powered by the cmos battery; without precise motherboard schematics, however, that's going to be difficult; even if it gets identified, I don't see how it would be solved without some sort of hardware hacking.
My personal solution is to design an arduino-based circuit that plugs on the battery connector of the motherboard, and allows a 'reset' through a front panel button. It's less than ideal, but that's better than having to open the case and remove my gfx card just to get the battery out.
mkarwin - Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - link
Well if CMOS reset does not fix the issue there's either a failing BIOS chip or circuitry throughout the board's layers... Theoretically one could pinpoint the issue by replacing the BIOS chip...BTW. I honestly wonder why they haven't thought of putting BIOS(es) on microSD cards, some of those smaller ones would be dirt cheap nowadays and capacituous enough to handle modern UEFI BIOSes - easy to remove/replace/reflash, could maybe improve the consumer attitude towards the issue if it is related to BIOS chips...
hansip87 - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link
What i don't understand with AMD mini ITX board is how few are their USB ports available at the back. one of the reasons why i chose going intel route was that there is this cheap Asrock Z490 itx board with 8 USB ports at the back. Sure it;s not the only factor but why can't any of AMD ITX boards do the same?romrunning - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link
Well, you can always just get a plug-in USB hub if you need more. I think the mfgs don't add as many USB ports mostly as a cost-savings.mkarwin - Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - link
Seems quite odd considering they are still asking more ($) for less (size & features)... It's not like they're running out of space on I/O shield, there's no integrated massive cooling openings in most cases, so adding eg. 4 extra even 2.0 USB ports would be more beneficial than having 3 display outputs for the integrated Radeon solutions... I could see a future where more integrated display outputs is beneficial - if they allow adding those server/compute accelerators without display outputs so that they could pass through the display to those board integrated ports. Otherwise, I think maybe 1 HDMI is enough. Especially if you can use said HDMI to pass through audio from the integrated card as well...jeremyshaw - Monday, December 7, 2020 - link
Probably the massive AMD AM4 keep out area. It doesn't really matter for mATX and ATX, but for mITX, every mm^2 matters. But every B550 ITX board is flawed in some way.ASUS hates rear I/O altogether, ASRock ditches the S/PDIF and doesn't have all that many USB ports (still more than ASUS). Gigabyte's never head of USB-C headers, and MSI gets all of that right, but has a proprietary backplate.
X570 came out a year earlier and is worse in many ways. ASUS is pricing their top end board for people without sense, and all of the X570 mITX boards from all other vendors lack the USB-C header. All of them are also 1GbE only, which seems like a waste for such a fast platform. ASRock has TB3, but only one M.2 slot, and very few USB ports.
In the end, I've held off upgrading my old AB350 Fata1ity ITX, since nothing is really appealing w.r.t. upgrading (not to mention almost twice the price!). Ryzen 5000 might force my hand, but I'd still rather not "upgrade" to boards that are very flawed (IMO) vs their Intel counterparts.
On Intel, all is not perfect, but there are more "perfect" boards that don't have these same issues.