GIGABYTE Z590 Aorus Master Review: Soaring High With Rocket Lake

Board Features

The GIGABYTE Z590 Aorus Master is an ATX motherboard and it represents a bridge between the mid-range and the flagship models. It's based on the Aorus series which is primarily targeted at gamers, but it also includes plenty of premium controllers and features for multiple areas of users such as content creators and enthusiasts. It uses a lot of Intel's 11th generation Rocket Lake and Z590 features, including two full-length PCIe 4.0 slots that can operate at x16/x0 and x8/x8, with a third full-length slot locked down to PCIe 3.0 x4. In regards to storage options, the Z590 Aorus Master has three M.2 slots, including one with support for PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe and two with support for PCIe 3.0 x4/SATA drives, as well as six SATA ports that include support for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 arrays. Memory support is also impressive with supported speeds of up to DDR4-5400 when combined with Rocket Lake, with a combined total of 128 GB available across four memory slots. There's also plenty of options for cooling including ten 4-pin headers, with one dedicated to a CPU fan, one for an optional CPU fan and water cooling device, four for chassis fans, and four additional 4-pin headers for chassis fans or water pumps.

The Z590 Aorus Master has one of the best-equipped rear panels on Z590. This includes one USB 3.2 G2x2 Type-C, five USB 3.2 G2 Type-A, and four USB 3.2 G1 Type-A ports. Networking support is premium with one Aquantia AQC107 10 GbE controller, with an Intel AX210 Wi-Fi 6E CNVi offering both wireless and BT 5.2 connectivity. Looking at the onboard audio solution, GIGABYTE includes a Realtek ALC1220-VB HD audio codec and an ESS Sabre ES9118 DAC pairing which drives five 3.5 mm audio jacks and S/PDIF optical output, while a DisplayPort 1.2 video output allows users to run a system from Intel's integrated UHD graphics. 

Test Bed

With some of the nuances with Intel's Rocket Lake processors, 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. Adaptive Boost Technology is disabled by default.

We must also thank the following:

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