Motherboard Design and Features
Aesthetics
Gigabyte used to make contrasting colour themes for their motherboards. With the introduction of RGB lighting on motherboard in the past years, they have toned the design down with a more monochromatic theme. This allows the RGB lights to take the spotlight, accentuating the logo and branding of Gigabyte/AORUS.
The shiny metallic gray for the heat sinks is well paired with the base black PCB. From what we understand, having the black PCB is more than just a choice for aesthetics, since the colour is also better at radiating heat. This keeps the computer system cooler than motherboards that uses other colours. Based on our first impression, the X299 AORUS MASTER motherboard exudes a ferocious look, which could be great for system builders who are particular with aesthetics and want to build a powerful gaming machine.
Luckily, the X299 AORUS MASTER was designed with just the right amount of RGB lighting. These lighting zones are placed at the VRM, audio chipset and X299 chipset areas.
Power Design
As the new Skylake X Refresh lineup comes with a 18 core/ 36 thread processor that is rated at 165W TDP, the motherboard should be sufficiently equipped with the right power circuitry to enable a reliable setup. This is why the X299 AORUS MASTER motherboard is designed with a 12 phase digital CPU power design and equipped with a digital PWM controller.
During the initial launch of the Skylake X and X299 chipset 1.5 year back, many motherboard manufacturers have been slammed for providing sub-par power design on the motherboard that failed to provide adequate power delivery to the new HEDT processors. Famous overclocker Der8auer showed that many motherboards experienced VRM throttling, limiting the true potential of the whole system.
The X299 AORUS MASTER motherboard was designed with extra care with regards to that incident. In fact, it was created to over-provide the electrical requirements of the platform and processors. For a start, we saw that the motherboard is equipped with 2 x 8 pin CPU Power Connector that ensures sufficient power can be drawn from the Power Supply without exceeding the 8pin connector’s recommended rate. An additional 6 pin power connector can also be seen next to the SATA connectors to further provide power to hungry PCIe devices such as video cards.
Furthermore, the motherboard was manufactured on a thicker copper layer PCB design. This lowers the impedance and power loss on the power and ground layer, resulting in better power efficiency and cooling. Even though users will not feel too much of a difference for their day to day use, such small differentiation factors could cause significant effects in extreme overclocking scenarios when each component of the whole system is pushed to their limits.
Thermal/Cooling Designs
To effectively cool the various components on the motherboard, Gigabyte has improved their heatsink design on the X299 AORUS MASTER. They are using a fin-array heatsink design which can increase the rate of heat dissipation. Understanding that the VRM can get hot when the system draws a large amount of power, they have even included a fan within the heatsink to improve the airflow. However, we noticed that this fan is placed within a small space under the VRM/IO shroud. We are unsure whether the fan will be able to bring sufficient airflow within the confined space for the cooling solution to be effective. Moreover, the fan will also bring about more dust to the fin-array heatsink in the long run.
Other than the VRM heatsinks, each individual M.2 slot also has its dedicated heatsink. This ensures that all M.2 SSDs will not face any performance issues due to high temperatures.
To further improve the cooling performance, the X299 AORUS MASTER is also equipped with a thermal baseplate that can cool components that are found on the back of it. Also, this toughened baseplate also prevents the motherboard from warping from extreme temperatures or physical pressure. Overall, the durability of the whole motherboard is improved via this design.
Durability Features
It is almost standard that all high-end motherboards are all equipped with strengthened connectors, ports and slots. The X299 AORUS MASTER is equipped with
- Solid pin power connectors
- Ultra Durable PCIe Armor
- Ultra Durable Memory Armor
These additional features further improves the durability of the motherboard, especially at places where the motherboard interfaces with other components. It helps in preventing damage to the motherboard due to excessive pressure.
Enhanced Built-In Audio
Gone were the days when system builders condemn integrated on-board audio as poor quality. With improvements in technology, motherboard manufacturers are getting better at including high grade audio components onto the motherboard for audio performance that are comparable to dedicated sounds cards.
Gigabyte had spent extra effort in placing good audio hardware on their motherboard. Specifically for the X299 AORUS XTREME, they have selected specialized components that are known to provide excellent audio experience for users. For audio signal processing, the digital and analogue signals are converted and processed by the ESS 9218 Sabre DAC. This DAC is rated with a 130dB SNR. The signals are then passed through high quality audiophile grade capacitors and out from the gold plated audio jacks to ensure that the audio comes out in its truest form.
2.5 Gigabit Ethernet LAN
The X299 AORUS MASTER also comes with an multi-gigabit ethernet port that can run up to speeds of 2.5Gbps. While Gigabyte has proclaimed that it is designed for better online gaming experience, we believe that such a feature will also benefit for productivity work as well for things such as transferring massive amount of files between servers. However, do take note that your networking equipment must also support the 2.5Gbps (or higher) speed to capitalize on this specialized Gigabit Ethernet port.
We find that the 2.5Gbps port is good to have, but probably not essential as most users would likely need to have an expensive 10Gbps network switch to support it. In this case, they would rather have a 10Gbps ethernet port instead.