The GIGABYTE Z690 Aorus Master Mobo Review: 10GbE Rounds Out A Premium Board

Board Features

The GIGABYTE Z690 Aorus Master is a premium E-ATX motherboard that sits just below the flagship Aorus Xtreme and Xtreme WaterForce models. The Aorus series stretches across its mid-range, premium, and flagship models, and in the case of the GIGABYTE Z690 Aorus Master, it is designed to offer a solid feature set by using most of what Alder Lake and the Z690 chipset has to offer. This includes one full-length PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, as well as two full-length PCIe 4.0 slots operating both at x4. 

For storage, GIGABYTE includes five M.2 slots in total, three supporting PCIe 4.0 x4 drives, one with support for PCIe 4.0 x4 and SATA drives, and one with support for PCIe 3.0 x4 drives. In terms of SATA, there are six SATA ports with support for Intel RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 arrays. Focusing on memory support, the Z690 Aorus Master has four slots capable of supporting DDR5-6400 memory with a maximum capacity of 128 GB.

Cooling options are impressive, with room for a combined total of ten 4-pin cooling devices. This includes two dedicated to CPU fans, four doubling up as chassis or water pump headers, and four for chassis fans.

There is plenty of connectivity on the GIGABYTE Z690 Aorus Master, including one USB 3.2 G2x2 Type-C, one USB 3.2 G2 Type-C, five USB 3.2 G2 Type-A, and four USB 3.2 G1 Type-A ports on the rear panel. In terms of front panel USB support, there's one USB 3.2 G2x2 Type-C header (one port), two USB 3.2 G1 Type-A headers (four ports), and two USB 2.0 headers (four ports).

GIGABYTE is using a premium networking array including one Marvell AQtion AQC113 10 GbE controller and an Intel AX211 Wi-Fi 6E CNVi. Onboard audio is also premium with a single Realtek ALC1220-VB HD audio codec that powers five 3.5 mm audio jacks and S/PDIF optical output. This is also assisted by an ESS Sabre ES9118 DAC.

Test Bed

With some of the nuances with Intel's Alder Lake processors including the new P and E-cores, our policy is to see if the system gives an automatic option to increase the power limits of the processor. If it does, we select the liquid cooling option. If it does not, we do not change the defaults.

We must also thank the following:

Hardware Providers for CPU and Motherboard Reviews
Sapphire RX 460 Nitro	MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X OC	Crucial MX200 + MX500 SSDs	Corsair AX860i + AX1200i PSUs
G.Skill RipjawsV, SniperX, FlareX	Crucial Ballistix DDR4	Silverstone Coolers	Noctua Coolers