Apart from the unveiling of 7nm Ryzen 3rd Gen CPUs and AMD Navi GPUs, another notable announcement made at AMD’s keynote at Computex 2019 was the brand new X570 motherboard chipset. According to the announcement, the X570 chipset will be the first to support PCIe 4.0 which has double the bandwidth and 42% faster storage performance than PCIe 3.0. This chipset will support AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 3rd generation processors and AMD Navi graphics cards. All X570 motherboards were announced to hit the shelf starting from July 7, 2019.
However, we were among the first to get our hands on one of those – the X570 AORUS Master.
The X570 AORUS Master is one of the newest additions to AORUS’ X570 motherboard lineup and is a significant improvement over all the presiding X470 motherboards. With it’s advanced thermal cooling system, ultra-durable design, stunning performance, and excellent looks, the X570 AORUS Master is the perfect addition to it’s gaming series motherboards as it can handle all present compatible hardware in the market and comes with several future proof features which will make sure it is not discarded for being obsolete in the coming years.
Let us talk about the motherboard in detail and discuss it’s features –
Durability and Build Quality
GIGABYTE, AORUS’ parent company has always highlighted their motherboards’ “Ultra-Durable” construction in their advertisements. The X570 AORUS Master lives up to the advertisement as it is indeed ultra-durable and damage resistant. The motherboard comes with an integrated base plate which is made of quality aluminium instead of traditional iron. The aluminium base plate gives the motherboard a strong foundation and makes it less susceptible to bending due to the weight of other hardware. The motherboard also comes with a solid integrated I/O shield, giving the back panel ports a much higher amount of protection compared to traditional thin-metal external I/O shields.
The stainless steel shielding design of the motherboard’s PCIe connectors and it’s extra anchor points makes sure that the X570 AORUS Master is capable of supporting heavy graphics cards. This PCIe shielding design offers up to 3.2x stronger retention force and 1.7x stronger shearing strength. The DIMM memory slots are stainless steel shielded too which prevents any sort plate bending or PCB distortion under pressure.
Both the motherboard’s power connectors, viz, ATX 24 pin and ATX 12V 8+8 pin, are solid plated. More metal means larger contact area for electricity and increased sustainability during overloading.
Thermal Design
Apart from durability, another feature which consumers look for while buying a high-end gaming motherboard is it’s cooling system. Increased motherboard temperature will eventually result in the heating up of the processor eventually leading to thermal throttling. The X570 AORUS Master made sure that their buyers do not go through the same.
The motherboard’s thermal design consists of four notable features – Fins-Array Heatsink, Direct Touch Heatsink, 5 W/mK LAIRD thermal Conductivity Pad, and a Thermal Baseplate. Compared to traditional heatsinks of the same size attached to many other high-end motherboards, the Fins-Array Heatsink increases the heat dissipation area by 300% with the help of it’s Direct Touch Heatpipe which transfers heat from MOS fins. The Thermal Baseplate, made of aluminium not only protects the motherboard against bending but also helps in passive heat dissipation after heat is transferred from the back-side PCBs to the baseplate. The LAIRD 1.5mm thick, 5 W/mK thermal conductivity pads can transfer 2.7x more heat over a certain time period than other traditional thermal pads.
“All Hybrid Fan Headers can automatically detect the type of cooling device whether it be fan or pump with different PWM or Voltage mode.” – AORUS Website.
That’s right. The X570 AORUS Master comes with 7 Hybrid fan Headers which lets you connect any cooling device with ease. Whether it’s a cooling fan, watercooling pump, water flow sensor, etc, the motherboard will automatically detect the type of cooling device connected to it’s header through the Smart Fan 5 software. Speaking of which, the Smart Fan 5 software let’s you customize your fans’ speed and gives you real time information about the water flow rate/temperature, among other features. The motherboard comes with 9 temperature sensors (7 internal and 2 external) using which you can keep track of your system’s temperature. With the help of the Fan Stop feature, you can map any fan to completely stop when the temperature drops below a certain point, thereby saving electricity without compromising on the cooling part. The motherboard comes with a Noise Detection cable which can be connected to the motherboard’s header to monitor the noise level of various devices such as CPU cooler, graphics card, system fans, etc. You can monitor the noise level and increase/decrease the fan speed to get the optimal noise level based on your preference.
Power Efficiency
Power efficiency and resistance to power surge is necessary for all motherboards since all of the system components are connected to it. The X570 AORUS Master comes with an excellent power design which will give you the maximum possible performance from the new Ryzen 3rd generation processors. Unlike many other motherboards which comes with a parallel power design, the X570 AORUS Master comes with Direct 14 Phases Digital Power which gives the motherboard a total power of 700A which each phase providing atleast 50A of power, thereby giving you 4% higher efficiency than traditional power design. The motherboard comes with 2x Copper PCBs which gives you better power efficiency at lower impedance and temperature, something which is necessary during overclocking to make sure that the motherboard can handle increased power load.
DIMM and PCIe 4.0 Support
The X570 AORUS Master supports Dual Channel ECC/ Non-ECC Unbuffered memory architecture. It comes with 4 DDR4 DIMM slots, with each slot supporting upto 32 GB memory capacity, thereby supporting a total memory capacity of 128 GB. The motherboard offers XMP upto 4400 MHz giving you a massive performance boost upon enabling the XMP function. The motherboard is compatible with over 1000 DDR4 memory modules so all you need is an XMP capable memory module to achieve the most out of your DDR4 memory.
As mentioned before, all X570 motherboards are PCIe 4.0 compatible. The X570 AORUS Master features a full PCIe 4.0 design, with support for backward compatibility with PCIe 3.0 design. It has 3 PCIe 4.0 slots which are compatible with the new 7nm AMD Navi GPUs. It offers multi-GPU support through Nvidia SLI and AMD Crossfire technology. The motherboard also has 3 PCIe 4.0 M2 NVMe slots each with their own thermal guards. These thermal guards will ensure that heat is dissipated from the ultra-fast M2 SSDs before it succumbs to thermal throttling.
Audio
One of the less discussed features of a motherboard is it’s audio. Noise reduction and clarity of sound depends not just on the headphones/speakers but also on the motherboard’s audio capacitors. The X570 AORUS Master got that covered too. It comes with the new Realtek ALC1220-VB with Smart Headphone Amp which automatically detects the impedance of the headphones connected to the system. This helps in preventing issues such as volume distortion and low volume by automatically adjusting the sound settings based on the headphones’ impedance. The motherboard also has WIMA and Nichicon Fine Gold capacitors which gives you studio quality sound experience.
Connectivity
When I mentioned “future proof”, I referred to the motherboard’s support for PCIe 4.0 as well as it’s connectivity features, both wired and wireless.
“A high-end product needs to be future-proof so your system stays up-to-date with the latest technology. X570 AORUS motherboards provide all next generation network, storage, and WIFI connectivity to keep you up to speed.” – AORUS Website.
Wireless connectivity is a feature which is found mostly in high-end motherboards. The X570 AORUS Master comes with jaw-dropping wireless performance. It comes with Bluetooth 5 which has a higher transmission speed than Bluetooth 4.2, and with 4x the range. As for Wifi, the motherboard comes with the new Intel Wifi 6 802.11ax which can offer internet speeds upto 2.4 Gbps (2400 Mbps). The motherboard also comes with the AORUS Antenna which offers multiple angle tilt for the best Wifi signal transmission. These wireless features offered by the X570 AORUS Master has blurred the line between wired and wireless connectivity since you can play online games, stream videos, and download files without any network traffic interference even in areas with multiple devices.
Now coming to wired connectivity, the X570 AORUS Master comes with a 2.5 GbE LAN port which provides 2x faster transfer speeds than the previous 1 GbE connectivity. It supports internet speeds upto 2.5 Gbps (2500 Mbps) and is also compatible with Multi-Gig RJ-45 Ethernet. The motherboard also comes with a traditional Intel GbE LAN port. However, it features cFosSpeed, a network traffic management software which adjusts the network bandwidth priority for each software thereby reducing the ping in order to deliver the perfect network connectivity.
As for USB, the X570 AORUS Master comes with a USB 3.2 Gen2 reversible Type-C port in the back panel and an onboard USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C header which offer speeds up to 10 Gb/s. Apart from that, it has 1 USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port in the back panel, 2 USB 3.2 Gen 2/Gen 1 Type-A ports in the back panel (Gen2 support for Ryzen 3rd generation processors only), 2 USB 3.2 Gen1 ports in the back panel and 2 onboard USB 3.2 Gen1 headers, 4 USB 2.0/1.1 ports in the back panel and 2 onboard USB 2.0/1.1 headers. The motherboard features USB TurboCharger, a GIGABYTE technology which allow users to recharge their mobile devices 6 times faster. This can be achieved by connecting the mobile device to the front panel USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A port which is in turn connected to the motherboard’s USB 3.2 Gen1 header.
Apart from these, the back panel consists of 1 optical S/PDIF Out connector, 5 Audio jacks, and two BIOS buttons (Q-Flash Plus and Clear CMOS) for easy debugging.
Design and RGB
Now that we have discussed the necessary hardware specifications of the X570 AORUS Master, let us talk about it’s looks and visual design. The motherboard is designed in a way which is bound to attract the attention of hardware enthusiasts. The motherboard itself is black in color whereas it’s heatsink, DIMM shields, and PCIe shields are colored shiny silver. The placement of the internal headers, the CPU socket, DIMM slots, PCIe slots are perfect which gives the motherboard a premium look as well as makes it easier for us to install other hardware components on it.
As for RGB, the X570 AORUS Master got that covered too. It comes with onboard RGB as well as 2 Addressable LED strip headers and 2 RGB LED strip headers. With the use of the RGB Fusion 2.0 software, you can customize the RGB lighting of your entire system. The software gives you full freedom to choose whatever lighting pattern you want; sync all your AORUS peripherals to a similar pattern, or customize each and every peripheral and assign a different pattern for all of them.
As announced at Computex, all X570 motherboards are supposed to hit the shelves on July 7, 2019 which means it’s only a matter of weeks before you can get yourself one of those. Even though AORUS or it’s parent company GIGABYTE have not officially announced the price for the X570 AORUS Master, we are expecting it to be around 25000 INR based on the pricing of their previous X470 motherboards. The price may seem a little high and not exactly something you’d refer to as “budget friendly” but then again, this motherboard is one of AORUS’ high-end desktop products designed for heavy workload such as extreme overclocking and long-term gaming. Therefore, the price is pretty much justified considering the features which come with this motherboard. This review pretty much explains everything that you needed to know about the X570 AORUS Master, however, you can visit AORUS’ official website for more information.
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