Overclocking
When it comes to overclocking, the GIGABYTE Z490 Aorus Master has a lot to offer. The VRM’s are absolutely excessive for even highly overclocked CPUs like the Core i9-10900K. The UEFI BIOS is well suited to overclocking. All the options you could really ever need are present. The system also didn’t have trouble POST’ing up to 5.2GHz, but unfortunately, it just isn’t stable at a reasonable voltage.
It takes very little to get the most out of this specific Core i9-10900K. I simply set the vCore for 1.3v and then set the multiplier at 5.1GHz. This worked perfectly, providing a stable computing experience doing any and all tasks. Furthermore, memory compatibility and overclocking worked well. I was able to achieve memory speeds up to DDR4 3600MHz easily with some modules rated for that. I don’t have too many that go past that, but GIGABYTE claims these boards clock upwards of DDR4 5000MHz. Given the build quality and design, I don’t doubt it.
Final Points
I’ll try and keep this brief since this one is a bit long-winded than I had hoped. At the time of this writing, the GIGABYTE Z490 Aorus Master costs right around $360. It’s not cheap, but quality rare if ever is. The GIGABYTE Z490 Aorus Master has a very beefy VRM, good build quality, and a solid feature set. It’s even aesthetically pleasing. The board was stable and did everything I could have asked it to do. The one issue I had with the board revolved around the Intel i225v, and that was fixed with a BIOS upgrade. All in all, my experiences with this motherboard were excellent.
During the time I was reviewing this motherboard, I built a system for a friend that used the same board. My experiences with that one were identical to this one. We don’t often get to sample two boards during a review or even see another one most of the time. In this case, I did. Both were excellent and in my experience, the GIGABYTE Z490 Aorus Master is worth a serious look if you are in the market for a shiny new LGA 1200 motherboard.
Discussion
