Review on GIGABYTE Z490 AORUS ALC1220 VB Motherboard by Andrew Patel

I bought this board to use with my new I7-10700k. I was a bit skeptical about Gigabyte at first, simply because I've always supported ASRock for good mid-range boards. This board looks great and has all the features I was looking for and what you would expect from a Z490 board. I'm not a super duper tech when it comes to ALL the board's features, so I'll stick with what I know. Pros: Good lighting on board and overall nice looking board All Sata ports (6) and M.2 ports I need (3 considering PCIE x16 likely occupied by GPU) Arrived with no defects! Overall easy installation! All in all, everything went with little effort * More on that below. Cons: 1) I couldn't find anywhere in the instructions to mention this, but by default the board is set to reset you with an error right after the Aorus logo appears (nothing to download). I had a Win10 Pro on an SSD and another normal HDD but the system didn't recognize them. This was disconcerting as I expected it to boot directly into Windows. The logical solution is to go into BIOS and press boot sequence, but the system didn't show anything there. I won't go into more details but in short you need to go into CSM settings and enable legacy options to boot. If you do that, save and reboot, you can go back to the BIOS and set the boot priority, and everything was pretty smooth from there. My complaint is that there is no mention of this procedure. 2) CPU VOLTAGE. This really bothers me and is the only reason I deducted a star. After several tests in several CPU intensive games (Planet Coaster and Total War: Rome 2) everything was quite stable and the maximum temperature was 54 ° C. With CPU-Z, Real-Temp and Hardware Monitor I found that the voltage my VCORE rises to 1.66V!?!?!?! It seems a little crazy to me. I'm shocked my pace wasn't faster. By default the Aorus Ultra board puts VCore in adaptive mode and I feel that is MUCH redundant. However, I will say that it is VERY easy to fix. Just go into the bios and disable the adaptive voltage and set it to 1.35-1.38V and try that as a fixed voltage, or if you like messing around with LLC and offsets to increase it depending on your comfort level remedy. What frustrated me was that they shipped the board in a configuration that could kill your CPU relatively quickly if left alone (at least to my understanding). I understand that a silicon performs better than others and such, but 1.66V?!?! even 1.5 is too much, lol. I don't even like anything over 1.4V, regardless of temperature. Overall I am very satisfied with the board and can only recommend it to everyone! Just make a quick decision on how to fix the adaptive core stress situation. Money well spent! If you've never used a gigabyte board before, get ready to do some bios research. There's a lot to play with :) but that's + in my book. Looks great and works great so far!