GIGABYTE X670E

When it comes to getting the best performance out of the latest and greatest hardware, you’re going to want a pretty decent motherboard. Amazingly, these days, you can actually get close to flagship performance from your CPU and GPU on surprisingly affordable motherboards, at least compared to the terrifying prices of the flagship motherboards. Of course, you’re not paying a lot more just for a little extra CPU performance, it certainly goes a lot deep than that. The Gigabyte X670E AORUS EXTREME is an absolute beast and features some of the most robust connectivity and build quality you’ll ever find on a motherboard.

Three flagship-class X670E boards go head to head to see who reigns supreme!

However, we're not foolish enough to believe that any of us have a laser focus on performance with no other considerations even entering our minds. We've all got brands we like, even if only to keep our software control packages to a minimum, or to leave a single brand shining out throught the RGB lighting. Similarly some of us want systems that are good for the foreseeable future, or we have a ton of peripherals we need USB ports to manage, or enormous digital collections that push storage capacity to the extremes. Or maybe you just like having a model in the upper reaches of a manufacturers range as they tend to be the ones that receive the quickest driver and BIOS updates. Whatever camp you fall into, it's clear from sales figures alone that we all have wide ranging desires.

While X670E is just pushing into the market, the AORUS Master is one of the better boards we have tested for this new platform.

First, let's discuss an easy to understand topic, but quite complicated in the technical aspect, and that is the motherboards BIOS. While this Gigabyte X670E AORUS Master review comes a few weeks after AMD Ryzen 7000 series launch, multiple BIOS revisions have occurred in the meantime, solving some of the early issues and strengthening memory compatibility. There are still a number of system memory restrictions and minor performance bugs that will take many more months or possibly even up until the next CPU cycle to fully resolve. While the BIOS for this Gigabyte X670E AORUS Master is fairly flushed out, with all the features you expect from a product of this tier, memory support is still a concern. It is not to say that this motherboard cannot handle higher memory frequencies, rather the design of these AMD CPUs, combined with its current AGESA revision dictates the overall compatibility. From a distance, in a lot of ways this is reminiscent of the early days of AMD Ryzen, where if the system memory in question that wasn't on the motherboards QVL list, it simply refuses to work. Higher speed memory that was commonly used on Intel platforms at the time did not work at all, and often four memory DIMMs did not work either. It wasn't until the second generation of the Ryzen CPUs did many of these initial memory restrictions become less of a issue. DDR5 is new to AMD. For an example of the strangeness going on here, one the of two Netac Shadow II DDR5-4800 kits refused to boot. It was narrowed down to one of the DIMMs. Though, this gives little indication to what the issue could be, as it works fine on the Intel Z690 platform. Just like Intel last year, AMD is going through the teething process. Unfortunately, that means the end users (you) are the early adopters, because DDR5 is the only supported memory type on this AM5 platform.