Review on GIGABYTE X570 AORUS Ultra Gaming Motherboard (AMD Ryzen 5000/X570/ATX/PCIe 4.0/DDR4/USB 3.1/Realtek ALC1220-Vb/Fins-Array Heatsink/RGB Fusion 2.0/3xM.2 Thermal Guard) by Edward Henderson

UPDATE 03/2020: Applied BIOS update v. Crucial 4x16GB DDR4 support still not working. BSOD @ 3200. This board likely has some major design issues behind the unicorn level of supported 4x16GB memory configuration. UPDATE 12/2019: The BIOS update v.F11 seems to have fixed the USB keyboard crashing issue. XMP (3200) support for my Crucial 4x16GB DDR4 is still broken. ORIGINAL REVIEW: Quality control first: My phone arrived, I transferred parts of my old AM4 AB350 (3800x included) and switched to the new board in about an hour, it booted up, ran Win10 1903 for about an hour. spontaneously restarted, returned, worked 3 more minutes, and then died forever! Revain replaced the board. The rest of the review was based on the replacement: Next Disappointment: My Crucial Ballistix 16GB x 4 @ 3200 worked fine on my 3 year old Gigabyte AB350 AM4 board on 3200 but didn't get over 2400 on AORUS X570 (same processor and all) . The QPL appears to be heavily geared towards 8GB modules, and of the 35 tested in the CPL over 3200, only 3 are eligible for 4-DIMM compatibility (vs. 2-DIMM). I've tried a few things, including updating the BIOS to F10 and the new AGESA 1.0.0.4VRM/CPU/Header: Everything is conveniently laid out and the main system support components are spacious. There's plenty of room for everything and plenty of places to hook up fans and the like. I like the active chipset fan and wish more people had one (especially people like me who are water-cooled and don't have a traditional CPU fan blowing air). RGB: another disaster. If you've seen an old AB350 or SN1PER in action, you know what built-in LEDs should look like. This board has some tiny LEDs that barely emit any light. Damn. The status lights on my Adaptec RAID controller are dimming the onboard AORUS LEDs. Also, the addressable RGB header doesn't seem to work for me. I have no idea if that's a bug or what. Anyway, I have Corsair Link running my own lighting solution so it's not a deal breaker and I've dropped AORUS RGB support in favor of my own. great looking heatsinks for NVME drives. Bad: My heatsinks are not making good contact with my Samsung EVO 960 Pro. Although the heatsink is equipped with a thermal pad, contact gaps remain when the heatsink is fully installed. I ended up removing their heatsink and using my own active NVME heatsink until I found a better solution (maybe lift the EVO 960 a bit to raise it a bit. Don't know yet). If you have an expensive NVME drive, I suggest doing a test install and putting a small strip of paper between the heatsink plate and the SSD. If you can pull the paper out easily, the thermal pad is probably not making good contact with your SSD. Overclocking: I wasn't freaking out, but I overclocked my 3800X to around 200MHz and everything seemed stable. Your mileage may vary. I have a pretty decent custom water cooling solution that maintains thermal performance. Overall, I'm happy with this board's ability to push Ryzen a little further. USB Ports: This board has another oddity that I haven't noticed in a while: buggy USB keyboard support on POST. The board doesn't recognize my hub-connected USB keyboards, so it doesn't recognize keystrokes on POST (full boot, fast, or ultra). Everything works as expected when I connect the keyboard directly to the motherboard (rather than to a hub connected to the mobile device). I used to run into this problem quite a bit when motherboards went from PS/2 to USB keyboards, and thought I'd seen it for the last time. but Gigabyte has declined in this regard. My previous board (AB350) had no problems. Other thoughts: - AMD Ryzen Master does not work with virtualization enabled. I don't think it's isolated from this board, so Gigabyte isn't to blame. All those Ryzen cores to run virtual machines. and without the possibility of overclocking. Gigabyte's own utility offers a rudimentary overclock that partially fills this gap. You will need an 8-pin 12V CPU power line AND a 4-pin 12V CPU power line Make sure your PSU supports it. If not, then some other Gigabyte x570s only need an 8-pin connector. Summary: This board was a disappointment compared to the older/lower model AB350 Gaming. Specifically: It didn't support my Crucial 16GB-3200, I had an early board failure (1 hour use), NVME heatsink didn't work properly, RGB address headers didn't work, lackluster RGB design and USB keyboard. behind the hub is not recognized correctly. If anything changes to the above I will post an update.