Review on 🎮 GIGABYTE Z490 AORUS Elite: High-Performance ATX Gaming Motherboard with Advanced Features by Joey Pritchard

First I received an open box. Quite a shock when I expected and paid for a new item. Luckily there was no damage or missing accessories and the board works fine. I'd happily refund the difference, but Revain CS is practically non-existent. Second, for packaging, they simply put a label on the box. The valve was loose (open box). Luckily nothing fell out in transit and none of the innards or anything was brushed off in transit. I prefer to keep boxes to store all my manuals and computer supplies. However, this box is already quite worn out, so thank you. Third, this is an issue with Z490 boards: if you're reusing an old graphics card (1060 in my case), two settings in the BIOS need to be changed to allow PCIe to initialize the GPU. This is NOT stated in the manual or in the Gigabyte website support FAQ (as for ASUS, I've already returned an ASUS board that I thought didn't work with PCEi). I spent a day and a half flashing all BIOS versions and trying different settings. It took a random Reddit comment saying to try CSM for Legacy, which ended up working. Otherwise the board itself works great. Seems to reliably survive if only shipped in its own box. Has plenty of USB and SATA, 2x M.2 ports that don't take up too much SATA. M.2 heat shields are pretty flimsy and probably don't do much, but you don't have to use them. The board looks nice.