16 power phases and passive chipset cooling

However, over the past two years, AMD has been able to prove that its Zen, Zen+ and Zen 2 microarchitecture chips can not only play in the same weight category as Intel processors, but in some situations can definitely be a better offer. For example, the latest 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X delivers the highest computing performance of any mainstream CPU to date, while the 6-core Ryzen 5 3600 rightfully claims to be the smartest choice in the mid-range segment. Therefore, it is not surprising that the market for Socket AM4 motherboards has changed dramatically by today.

The Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme motherboard, which will be discussed in this article, is just the clearest illustration of the changes that have taken place. The fact is that this is a flagship platform, the equipment of which can be envied by many LGA1151v2 boards of the upper price range. It boasts an extraordinary appearance, thoughtful cooling of all heating parts, a very powerful power converter, convenient diagnostic tools, high-quality integrated sound, a large number of USB 3.2 ports, PCI Express 4.0 slots, a built-in 10-gigabit network controller, Wi-Fi 6 support and a host of other advanced features. To be honest, when you take such a board in your hands, you involuntarily get the feeling that this is not an ordinary Socket AM4 board, but a full-fledged HEDT-level product.

Actually, the price hints at this. The Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme costs $700, and before it was completely unthinkable that a mainboard for mass AMD processors could pull that amount. But this is by no means a daring experiment of Gigabyte developers. Other manufacturers offer similarly priced Socket AM4 boards based on the X570 chipset, which clearly indicates the demand for such platforms. Moreover, it is also very symptomatic that the motherboards for the Intel LGA1151v2 platform did not manage to grow up to the 700-dollar bar. That is, according to motherboard manufacturers, it is precisely those buyers who rely on Ryzen, and not on Intel Core processors, who need the most powerful platforms today.

What will those users who decide to spend money on the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme get? That is what we will talk about in this review. But it’s worth mentioning its most unexpected trait right away: Gigabyte engineers dared to make such a board based on the X570 that by some miracle manages without active cooling of the chipset microcircuit. And this is one of the main intrigues of today’s testing, because there are currently no other X570 boards without a chipset fan.

⇡#Specifications

Considering the cost of the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme, it is not surprising that the characteristics of this board are turned up to the maximum. Everything you could wish for is on this board (almost without exception). Only the inability to connect expansion cards with Thunderbolt ports to this motherboard, as well as the absence of any video outputs on it, can upset. However, both are features that are rarely required in practice, and a $700 fee without them does not seem flawed at all.

The rest of the extensive characteristics of the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme can be estimated from the following table.

The Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme shows how powerful the combination of the Ryzen 3000 processor and the X570 chipset can be. We have already said that this board is similar to a platform for HEDT systems, and its passport characteristics again remind us of such a comparison. Unlike the Ryzen Threadripper, older Ryzen 3000 processors offer not as many PCI Express lanes for connecting an array of video cards and have only a dual-channel memory controller. But despite this, based on the X570 Aorus Xtreme, you can assemble a powerful system that can be used as a high-performance workstation. Especially after the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X processors hit the market.

Separately, it is worth mentioning that all the numerous functions of the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme are implemented on it in such a way that the board is really convenient to use. To do this, the engineers applied a number of non-standard layout solutions, which we will discuss in more detail later. Here, at the stage of getting acquainted with the technical characteristics, we suggest just looking at the circuit board.

Pay attention to the location of most of the connectors for connecting internal cables along the front edge of the board and the fact that the developers tried to free up as much space as possible in the vicinity of the graphics card. These are two important and distinctive design features of the X570 Aorus Xtreme.

⇡#Packaging and equipment

Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme comes in a large beautiful box with a rather informative and not overloaded design. The front of the package is adorned with a large Aorus logo, and on the back is an image of the board, listing its key features and specifications. By what features in the list are awarded a larger font and emphasis, you can guess what exactly the manufacturer considers the main thing in the X570 Aorus Xtreme. This is a powerful and high-quality power converter, efficient cooling, PCI Express 4.0 support, extensive RGB lighting controls, as well as additional network controllers — 10-gigabit wired and wireless Wi-Fi 6.

The board in question stands out among other X570 solutions not only by the size of the box, but also by how many additional accessories fit in this box. The package includes:

• USB drive with utilities and drivers;
• six SATA cables;
• two Wi-Fi antennas with a gain of 4 dBi;
• G-Connector module for easy connection of LEDs and case buttons;
• cable for connecting LEDs and case buttons;
• two cables for connecting addressable LED strips;
• one cable for connecting RGB LED strips;
• one sound pressure sensor;
• control unit AORUS RGB Fan Commander;
• six Velcro straps for cables;
• two remote temperature sensors;
• screws and stands for mounting M.2 drives;
• a set of stickers to decorate the case.

Individual accessories from this list are worthy of a more detailed description. For example, here’s what the included Wi-Fi antennas look like.

Or here’s another unusual item from the kit — braided SATA cables.

And the sound pressure sensor is generally a unique device that comes exclusively with Gigabyte’s flagship boards and allows you to control the noise level of a running system.

But the most generous addition to the board is the AORUS RGB Fan Commander block. This is a separate hardware module designed to control fans and synchronize RGB lighting on various accessories connected to the board.

Gigabyte positions this module as an indispensable device for modders, but it can also be useful for ordinary users, as it expands the capabilities of the board itself to configure and control the PC cooling system.

⇡#Design and features

Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme stands out from other boards with Socket AM4 not only because of its immodest price. In addition, it can be called outstanding both in size and weight. The fact is that it is made in the EATX form factor and is almost completely covered with metal casings on both sides. From the outside, the surface of the board is almost completely hidden behind the heatsink of the chipset and M.2 slots, as well as decorative shrouds that run along the edges of the board.

On the reverse side, the board is reinforced with an aluminum plate with a “nanocarbon” coating, made for better heat dissipation.

Efficient heat dissipation is an important trump card of the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme. The fact is that thanks to the well-thought-out chipset cooling system and the use of the back plate, the X570 Aorus Xtreme manages without a fan on the chipset. This is the only board of this kind on the market: all other motherboards built on the same chip use active cooling using small-sized fans. At the same time, there are no problems with the temperature regime of the X570 chip on the Gigabyte board under consideration — the passive cooling system copes well with heat removal from this chip with a thermal package of 15 W. During testing, we never saw the chipset temperature exceed 65 degrees.

Gigabyte’s secret lies not only in the size of the aluminum blank adjacent to the chipset. A heat pipe is laid at the base of the chipset heatsink, which also passes through all the other heatsinks of the motherboard, combining the cooling system of both the chipset and the VRM into one whole.

And the developers of Gigabyte obviously did not save on cooling the power converter at all. It uses a classic heatsink design used in CPU coolers: a rod heat pipe passes through the base of the heatsink, in which a package of thin aluminum fins is fixed.

In addition to this, direct contact technology is used, and LAIRD gaskets with improved thermal conductivity are chosen as the thermal interface material. This whole design turns out to be quite viable: the power supply circuit of the processor, just like the chipset, does not suffer from high temperatures at all.

However, this is largely due to the way the power converter is made on the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme. X570-based boards have more powerful power circuits than their predecessors as older Ryzen 3000 processors have ramped up their energy appetites. And for the X570 Aorus Xtreme, Gigabyte engineers assembled a 16-channel circuit (14 phases for the processor and 2 phases for the SoC) based on the Infineon TDA21472 power stages, controlled by the Infineon XDPE132G5C PWM controller.

This scheme has two key features. Firstly, gigantic power: each Infineon power stage is designed for current up to 70 A, that is, in total, the power converter can deliver current up to 1120 A. Secondly, all 16 phases in it are honest, there is no paralleling or doubling here, which means that such a circuit will be distinguished not only by high efficiency, but also by low ripples. In other words, the X570 Aorus Xtreme has almost the best power converter design among all Socket AM4 boards on the market. At least we have never seen real, separately working 16 phases in the Ryzen board power converter.

By the way, enthusiasts can control the operation of the power converter not only with built-in monitoring tools, but also directly with a multimeter. To simplify this procedure, the board has test points for measuring base voltages.

Anyway, enthusiasts should be very pleased with how the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme is designed. It has hardware Power On and Reset buttons, a POST code indicator, two BIOS chips with the ability to manually switch between them, and even the ability to update the firmware without the participation of a processor and memory. It is curious that the official Gigabyte website promises to install flash memory chips with BIOS in the “cribs” for their easy replacement, but in fact they are soldered to the board.

The Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme offers a pretty handy set of expansion slots. Three PCIe x16 slots are provided: the first two are connected to the processor lines, and the last one is connected to the X570 chipset. Thus, the first two slots can work in x16/x0 or x8/x8 modes (supporting SLI and CrossFire), while the third always functions as x4. When installing Ryzen 3000 processors into the board, all slots support the PCI Express 4.0 protocol with double the bandwidth.

This also applies to M.2 slots, which are also three on the board. Of these, the processor is responsible for the slot closest to Socket AM4, while the second and third slots work through the chipset. All of them are capable of accepting both NVMe and SATA drives.

I would like to say special thanks to Gigabyte engineers for the good location of all these slots. There is a lot of free space in front of the first PCIe x16, which will allow you to insert a video card with a three-slot cooling system into the board, and it will not block the next slot. And the M.2 connectors are placed so as not to be under the video card and not suffer from external heat. And in general, we thought separately about cooling M.2 drives: all slots are closed from above with aluminum heat-dissipating plates, which, when assembled, form a single whole with the chipset heatsink.

Another characteristic feature of the layout of the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme is the transfer of almost all internal connectors to the right edge of the board with their simultaneous turn parallel to its plane. This applies to both the 24-pin ATX power connector and many other connectors: for connecting five case fans, for LED strips, for case controls. Also on the right side of the board are six SATA ports, four USB 3.2 Gen1 ports and two USB 2.0 ports in a similar way.

However, not all connectors fit here. For example, outside the right side of the board there is an internal USB 3.2 Gen2 port, connectors for fans of the processor cooler and various sensors of the monitoring system, two 8-pin power connectors for the processor, and a connector for connecting the audio connectors of the front panel of the case. Even so, the specific design of the X570 Aorus Xtreme helps to optimize cable management inside the case. The AORUS RGB Fan Commander attached to the board can additionally help with this, to which you can shift the power and control of all the fans in the system unit.

The back panel of the board also looks unusual. And it’s not just that it comes with a pre-installed I / O Shield. Much more important is the high concentration of ports placed on it: in particular, there are 12 different USB ports, which can even be considered an application for a record.

More specifically, among this number, one port is USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C, five more ports (red) are USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A, two ports (blue and gray) are USB 3.0, well, four ports (black) — USB 2.0. Gigabyte decided to refuse support for PS / 2, but they implemented two wired network controllers at once: with a bandwidth of 10 Gb / s and 1 Gb / s. Also on the rear panel there are two antenna connectors of a Wi-Fi adapter operating in the Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) standard. And of course, the case is not complete without audio jacks: five analog and one digital optical S/P-DIF output.

The audio path in the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme is based on the eight-channel Realtek ALC1220-VB codec with a signal-to-noise ratio of up to 120 dB and an ESS Saber 9218 DAC chip with two 32-bit channels and a signal-to-noise ratio of 130 dB. Naturally, at the same time, the engineers did not forget to isolate the sound circuit from the rest of the board and introduce a high-quality TXC oscillator and audiophile capacitors WIMA and Nichicon Gold into it. In other words, the quality of the integrated sound card is beyond doubt, and the gold-plated audio jacks on the rear panel of the board do not look like empty foppishness.

As it has already become clear, along with the sound, great attention in the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme is also paid to network capabilities. What, for example, is the fact that the developers of the board added a second one to the usual gigabit network controller Intel I211-AT — Aquantia AQtion AQC107. The Aquantia chip is one of the few wired network controllers currently in existence that supports connections at speeds up to 10 Gbps.

In addition, the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme adds support for wireless networking, which is implemented by the latest Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 module. It is compatible with the IEEE 802.11ax standard and in the 2T2R configuration is capable of providing data transfer rates of 2.4 Gbps. The AX200 module also implements support for the Bluetooth 5 standard.

At the end of our acquaintance with the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme, it is worth saying that, in addition, this board is distinguished by very advanced capabilities in the field of hardware monitoring. So, the board controls the temperatures of seven different nodes of the system, plus it is possible to connect two external temperature sensors (included in the kit). Moreover, the Gigabyte board now has one more measurable value — the noise level. The required sound pressure transducer is included in the kit. A total of eight fans can be connected to the board, and it is not only able to independently determine their type and flexibly control their rotation speed, but also, under given conditions, is able to completely stop them.

Plus, eight more controllable fans can be connected via the optional AORUS RGB Fan Commander.

The developers did not bypass the RGB-backlight. However, in this case, it is relatively unobtrusive. By default, the zone of the processor power converter, chipset and sound card is highlighted, but if this is not enough for the user, he can add several LED strips on his own — there are four different connectors on the board to connect them.

All lighting, of course, is controlled: the proprietary RGB Fusion 2.0 application is responsible for it.

⇡#BIOS

The BIOS of Gigabyte motherboards has undergone a restyling, and in new products based on the X570 chipset, the shell looks a little different. The design has become more strict, and it is now easier to navigate the sections. In addition, a new Favorites page has been added to the BIOS menu structure, the contents of which the user can create with his own hands by sending the most important settings to it.

The start page of the «simplified» mode has also changed a lot. It clearly presents information about the system and contains links to the most popular functions.

However, users are likely to want access to a full range of options, and here, too, the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme has something to brag about.

The most important BIOS section for enthusiasts is Tweaker. All the basic settings for frequencies, voltages and timings are concentrated here. Its content is generally typical for Socket AM4 boards: here you can configure the processor operating modes.

CPU voltage can be specified both in absolute and relative values. Eight stages of Load-Line Calibration are supported. The voltage values ​​are regulated within a wide range, sufficient for both normal and extreme overclocking. Memory has full access to the memory controller parameters. The full set of screenshots taken in the Tweaker section is below.

But, unfortunately, we cannot say that it is easy to find all the options necessary for fine-tuning the Ryzen 3000 in the BIOS. For some reason, the developers of the board ignored the fact that the user may want to overclock the Infinity Fabric bus. There are no options on the Tweaker page to adjust its frequency, nor to change the VDDP and VDDG voltages.

Fortunately, these settings are still in the BIOS, although they will have to be looked for properly. Gigabyte developers did not bring them to the fore — they are hidden in the Settings / AMD Overclocking subsection provided by AMD itself.

From the AMD Overclocking section, you can also go to configuring Precision Boost Override technology, through which you can also try to overclock Ryzen 3000 processors.

Here you have access to all the necessary constants of the Precision Boost 2 technology, including the new variable Max CPU Boost Clock Override, which allows you to raise the ceiling of the frequency of processors in turbo mode.

Special mention deserves how the BIOS of the board in question implements fan control.

Everything is very flexible. Any of the fans can be linked to any thermal sensor, and the relationship between the rotation speed of each fan and the temperature can be set completely arbitrarily.

However, we still have quite significant complaints about the BIOS of the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme board. Although during the tests we did not encounter any problems related to BIOS flaws, Gigabyte clearly loses to other manufacturers in the speed of introducing new and sometimes highly demanded functions. You can give a lot of examples of settings that have long been in most boards from competing developers, but are missing in the BIOS of the board in question. For example, the X570 Aorus Xtreme does not have easy configuration of the Precision Boost Override functionality through profiles and there is no way to control the RGB backlight — just a simple on or off. Also in the BIOS, there was no place for the Secure Erase function for solid state drives, there is no way to view XMP profiles of memory modules, and there is no search by settings. Moreover, new firmware can be written to the board only using external media, since Gigabyte developers have not mastered updating the firmware via the Internet yet.

All these shortcomings are not critical, but in general, it should be taken into account that the BIOS of motherboards from Gigabyte based on the X570 chipset is not as rich in various kinds of service capabilities as the BIOS of motherboards from competing manufacturers.

⇡ # Overclocking

Overclocking on the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme results in a paradoxical situation. This board is clearly designed to work with the flagship Ryzen 3000 family processors. It has a very high level power converter that can provide clean power to processors with 12 or 16 cores operating at exorbitant frequencies. But in reality, it turns out that all this is completely unnecessary. The fact is that overclocking is absolutely alien to the processors of the Ryzen 9 family. They practically do not overclock, as we saw with our own hands, trying to squeeze additional performance out of the Ryzen 9 3900X test processor.

You have probably already seen the Silicon Lottery statistics, which show that the Ryzen 9 3900X processors are only guaranteed to overclock to 4.0 GHz on all cores. And the frequency of 4.2 GHz can take on average only one of the 17 processors. And we can only confirm these findings. Even on a motherboard as clearly geared towards overclocking as the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme, our Ryzen 9 3900X was only able to reach 4.05 GHz in overclocking.

In order to achieve stability in this case, we had to set the voltage to 1.212 V, as well as switch the Load-Line Calibration function to Extreme. With these setups, the Ryzen 9 3900X was able to successfully test in Prime 29.8 with AVX2 instructions enabled.

The processor temperature reached 92 degrees in this mode, while a two-section Noctua NH-D15 supercooler was used for cooling.

The overclocking fiasco is not the fault of the motherboard. Ryzen 3000 processors do indeed run very poorly and are subject to high heat, which is partly due to the transition to 7nm technology and the reduction in semiconductor die size, which has become even more difficult to remove heat from. In addition, we should not forget that for the Ryzen 9 3900X, far from the best crystals are selected in terms of frequency potential. Here, lower heat dissipation and low operating voltages are at the forefront, that is, silicon with lower leakage currents gets into the Ryzen 9 3900X, and it really scales worse at clock speed.

However, despite the fact that it is simply impossible to properly overclock the Ryzen 9 3900X on the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme (as well as on any other board), the advantages of this board manifest themselves in another way. Pay attention to the temperatures of the chipset and VRM during the stress test — they are not very high: the power converter heated up only to 47 degrees, and the chipset — up to 50. This is how the strengths of the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme design manifest themselves: the powerful power converter practically does not heat up even at high loads, the chipset also maintains a low temperature, despite the fact that on the board in question it is devoid of active cooling. It helps a lot here that the cooling system of the chipset and VRM is designed very well: it is not only a single whole, but also has high efficiency due to the use of a heat pipe and thin fins.

However, it is too early to finish talking about overclocking, because the processor can be overclocked not only in manual mode, but also through the Performance Boost Override function. The BIOS of the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme motherboard gives access to all the constants of the Performance Boost 2 technology, which, in theory, will allow you to increase the operating frequencies of the processor, which it reaches when working in automatic mode.

However, in fact, the use of Performance Boost Override for the Ryzen 9 3900X processor gives almost the same result as regular overclocking, that is, no. Even if you disable all three limits — PPT Limit, TDC Limit and EDC Limit, as well as increase the Max CPU Boost Clock Override parameter to a maximum of 200 MHz, the processor operating frequencies will hardly change.

With a single-threaded load, the frequency reaches 4.375 GHz, with a multi-threaded load — up to 4.0 GHz, and this is very similar to the operation of the Ryzen 9 3900X in nominal mode, despite the fact that Performance Boost Override technology is in full force here. In other words, the frequency of the Ryzen 9 3900X rests on some other restrictions that AMD does not allow the user to change. And no motherboard, even one as powerful as the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme, can change anything here.

An overclocker can please himself only by overclocking the RAM beyond the DDR4-3600 mode, which it makes sense to reach with the default settings. As it turned out, with the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme, synchronous clocking of the memory and the Infinity Fabric bus can also be achieved using DDR4-3733: to activate it, you must manually set the Infinity Fabric frequency in the BIOS.

But it turned out to be impossible to increase the frequency of Infinity Fabric above 1833 MHz while maintaining stability even if the VDDP and VDDG voltages were increased. And this means that DDR3-3733 is the maximum memory overclocking, which makes sense in this case.

⇡#Performance

In support of the thesis that overclocking the Ryzen 9 3900X on the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme does not make any sense, we tested the performance of this configuration in three modes: at default settings, with manual overclocking to 4.05 GHz, and with automatic overclocking through the function performance boost override.

The test system configuration looked like this:

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X (Matisse, 12 cores + SMT, 3.8-4.6 GHz, 64 MB L3).
• CPU cooler: Noctua NH-D15.
• Motherboard: Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme (Socket AM4, AMD X570).
• Memory: 2×8 GB DDR4-3600 SDRAM, 16-16-16-36 (G.Skill Trident Z RGB F4-3600C16D-16GTZR).
• Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (TU102, 1350/14000 MHz, 11 GB GDDR6 352-bit).
• Disk subsystem: Samsung 960 PRO 1TB (MZ-V6P1T0BW).
• Power Supply: Thermaltake Toughpower DPS G RGB 1000W Titanium (80 Plus Titanium, 1000W).

Testing was performed on the Microsoft Windows 10 Pro (v1903) Build 18362.175 operating system using the following driver set:

• AMD Chipset Driver 1.07.29.0115;
• NVIDIA GeForce 431.60 Driver.

Description of the tools used to measure computing performance:

Comprehensive benchmarks:

• Futuremark 3DMark Professional Edition 2.8.6546 — testing in the Time Spy Extreme 1.0 scene.

Applications:

• 7-zip 19.00 — archiving speed testing. The time taken by the archiver to compress a directory with various files with a total volume of 3.1 GB is measured. The LZMA2 algorithm and the maximum compression ratio are used.
• Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 20.0.4 — Graphics performance testing. The average execution time of the Puget Systems Adobe Photoshop CC Benchmark 18.10 test script, which simulates the typical processing of an image taken by a digital camera, is measured.
• V-Ray 4.10.03 — testing the performance of a popular rendering system using the standard V-Ray Benchmark Next application;
• x264 r2969 — testing the speed of video transcoding to H.264/AVC format. To evaluate performance, we use the original 2160p@24FPS AVC video file with a bitrate of about 42 Mbps.

Games:

• Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Resolution 1920 × 1080: Graphics Quality = Ultra High. Resolution 2560 × 1440: Graphics Quality = Ultra High.
• Far Cry 5. Resolution 1920 × 1080: Graphics Quality = Ultra, HD Textures = On, Anti-Aliasing = TAA, Motion Blur = On. Resolution 2560 × 1440: Graphics Quality = Ultra, HD Textures = On, Anti-Aliasing = TAA, Motion Blur = On.
• Hitman 2. 1920 × 1080 resolution: DirectX 12, Super Sampling = 1.0, Level of Detail = Ultra, Anti-Aliasing = FXAA, Texture Quality = High, Texture Filter = Anisotropic 16x, SSAO = On, Shadow Maps = Ultra, Shadow Resolution = high. Resolution 2560 × 1440: DirectX 12, Super Sampling = 1.0, Level of Detail = Ultra, Anti-Aliasing = FXAA, Texture Quality = High, Texture Filter = Anisotropic 16x, SSAO = On, Shadow Maps = Ultra, Shadow Resolution = High.
• Total War: Three Kingdoms. Resolution 1920 × 1080: DirectX 12, Quality = Ultra, Unit Size = Extreme. Resolution 2560 × 1440: DirectX 12, Quality = Ultra, Unit Size = Extreme.

The test results do not need any special comments. Everything points to the fact that overclocking the Ryzen 9 3900X is a completely pointless exercise, which ultimately gives a minimal increase in performance, and even then not in all situations. And this means that buying expensive motherboards like the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme with an eye to the fact that they can somehow help get higher performance from the flagship Ryzen 3000 processors does not make any sense.

⇡#Conclusions

Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme is a unique motherboard that brought HEDT-class equipment to the mass segment of Socket AM4 platforms. Compared to other boards based on the X570 chipset, it offers a number of significant advantages, such as a 10-gigabit network controller, built-in Wi-Fi 6, and a huge number of USB ports. In addition, the X570 Aorus Xtreme is also capable of boasting a spectacular appearance and advanced hardware monitoring, which can flexibly manage a huge number of fans, control a large number of temperatures, and even measure such an exotic parameter as noise pressure. But the most important advantage of this board is that it has the best processor power converter and a highly efficient cooling system that allows you to do without a fan on the chipset.

All this, no doubt, captivates, but there is one thing — a very immodest cost, reaching $ 700. In principle, such a price could even be called justified, because in many respects the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme is an uncompromising flagship board that offers more than the bulk of motherboards for Ryzen processors. But still, a board with a price higher than that of any processor compatible with it should be ideal, and we had some complaints about the X570 Aorus Xtreme, primarily regarding its BIOS content.

Besides, as the tests showed, the capabilities of the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme for modern Socket AM4 processors are largely unnecessary. An honest 16-channel power converter is certainly good, but even with the older Ryzen 3000 it will not be able to demonstrate its power, because overclocking is completely alien to these processors. Therefore, potential buyers of the X570 Aorus Xtreme should understand that they will end up paying for things that they will not be able to take full advantage of right now. However, do not forget that next year we are waiting for a meeting with Zen 3, and the stock that the X570 Aorus Xtreme has can still come in handy in the future.

In addition, redundancy in characteristics rarely stops real enthusiasts. Boards like the X570 Aorus Xtreme will surely have many fans, because, after all, this is a very worthy platform for uncompromising builds. There are not so many premium-level Socket AM4 boards on the market, and Gigabyte’s offer is not inferior to top-level competitors’ solutions (MSI MEG X570 Godlike, ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Formula) and even surpasses them in the design of the processor power converter and on-board cooling efficiency.