GIGABYTE Z490 AORUS Master (Intel LGA1200/Z490/ATX/Intel 2.5G LAN/3xM.2 Thermal Guard/SATA 6Gb/s/USB 3.2 Gen 2/Intel Wi-Fi 6/ESS Sabre DAC/Fins Array II/Gaming Motherboard)

I like the RGB and the VRM cooler which is so powerful and you can over cloak the i7-10700k to 5.1 ghz all cores

Motherboard is not working

It's really terrible motherboard. Low performance, poor quality parts. AIO is not performing as expected.

First things first. This motherboard is a premium quality motherboard. Initially, my son was leaning towards the ROG Strix Z490 so we bought that. I however convinced him to give Gigabyte the chance and it did not disappoint. It was his first build and went flawlessly. So lets dig into the Pros and cons.Pros:* Compatible with 10th Gen Intel processors as well as 11th Gen ones.* Awesome quality materials including the heatsinks, headers and IO shield.* PCIe4 ready. This will make a difference in storage drives moving data around at faster rates as soon as 11th Gen Intel processors are released.* Simple and awesome bios with easy setup as well as advanced options for power users.* WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5 support.* Ample USB 2 and USB3 as well as a couple M.2 slots for your killer SSDs.Cons:* No thunderbolt built in. However, this board is Thunderbolt ready with an included Thunderbolt header on the board. You just need to purchase an add-in board if you want this.* Documentation could use a tad bit of improvement. It was a bit confusing to which 8 pin header we would connect the CPU power till we looked up a YouTube video that specifically told us to use the left one unless we had some weird cooling system needs. I believe adding such detail may help. Also, after the initial install, Bluetooth seemed flaky. Weird internet videos suggested miraculous fixes merely by unplugging the PSU and rebooting but that was not the cause. NOTE: To users running into Bluetooth not working issues, please take out the antennae included in the Aorus package and connect to your motherboard. It will fix your problems. For gigabyte, it may help if the docs had this detail in there somewhere.The final build we did had a great 1TB NVMe M.2 SK Hynix Gold SSD. Both read and write speeds were excellent. Windows installed in about 4 minutes. All systems go. A bootup takes about 10 seconds, This is not from sleep but from a powered off state. Hope you have the same experience with your build! This board rocks with Windows 10!

This board is an absolute gem. There is one very bad aspect which is the 2.5gb Intel network adapter. The fix is to use driver 1.0.1.4 and then it's non issue, but this is a hardware problem and supposed to be fixed with newer versions of the board. That is a fault of Intel, not a deal breaker to me, as it can work with above driver, and a NIC could be added if you like. Now aside from that, my only gripe is gigabytes BIOS. It's not Asus pretty and easy, it's not as nice to navigate, and it's really aesthetic only. Functionally it's very powerful and every setting I ever want and more is there. Hardware wise this thing is gorgeous, it's over built and the power delivery while overclocking is just smooth and very controllable. Expansion and io leaves nothing to be desired. At this the price, you won't be disappointed. You also won't think "hey I got a sweet deal" because you are definitely paying for a mid-top end board, but you are getting one of the better z490 boards around. Don't run stock voltages, unless you update to F20a BIOS which really toned down the over voltage a lot. But still if you are running stock then there is probably better cheaper options for you than this. I would happily buy this for another build if I needed z490 again

Buena mobo, ninguna falla hasya ahora, amplia garantía

Bow 🙇 down to the Master! This thing is an absolute Beast! The top of the line Gaming motherboard from Aorus which beats everything hands down. The only better Aorus motherboard I could find was the Extreme Waterforce which is liquid cooled and 2x the price. Very happy with the performance except for a slight scare which is described as follows. This motherboard comes with a single 2.5 Gbe Intel Lan which can be a problem. There have been known issues with this Lan and Intel + Gigabyte have been releasing patches for it since early January 2020. After 15-20 days of use, one day my lan suddenly stopped getting detected. Tried everything, installed Gigabyte / Intel driver but nothing helped. The Lan was not deteein BIOS and the Mac Address was showing as N/A. I was planning to do an RMA but contacted Gigabyte Support first and they asked me to pull the CMOS battery out, short the Clr CMOS header and boom the lan was magically back. I have updated my BIOS to F7a and there have been bo issues since then. F5 and F6 BIOS are buggy and I was not even able to boot into BIOS with F5 so had no option but to update it. It was a big scare but glad that Gigabyte support help me sort out the issues. If and only if Gigabyte added an extra 1Gbe Lan port to this board, it would undoubtedly be the best Z490 board in the market. Boards like Vision D which are cheaper, come with mutiple LANs and that's unfortunate. However, apart from this there haven't been any issues. Been using this flawlessly and over-clocking my i9 10900k. Didn't have issues running my Trident GSkill RAM at 3600mhz as well.My configuration:Z490 Aorus Master running i9 10900K32gb Gskill Trident Z Neo 3600Mhz RamRTX 3080 Aorus MasterCM ML 240R AIOSamsung 970 Evo Plus Nvme M.2 1 TB3 Corsair LL 120 fans (front)1 Corsair QL 120 fan (rear)2 CM AIO fans (top)1 Corsair SP 120 stock fan (bottom)Hope this helps people make a decision. The LAN issue isn't a deal breaker and will go away with more stable BIOS and drivers in the future. Overall this board is a killer.

I was having issues with my old motherboard, so I upgraded to this one, and I am not disappointed! It has a bunch of neat features and onboard Bluetooth (antenna too). In addition to having many features, it looks great too with an onboard logo that lights up. I think you can also change the color it shows too.