Gigabyte Aorus X299 Gaming 7 Review

Test Setup

Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 7 – F7i BIOS
Intel i9 7900X
Corsair LPX 3200 – Stock Tests
G.Skill Trident-Z 3600 – OC Tests
Corsair LPX 4000 – Insane Limit Pushing Tests
Corsair RM1000i
Corsair MP500 512GB
Corsair H110i GT
Windows 10

Overclocking

In our time with the X299 chipset it’s clear that there are a couple of things which tend to limit your overclocking capabilities. The CPU thermals and the VRM thermals. As we’ll see at the end of this review the VRM thermals are fine, but curiously so are the CPU ones, so we’re not entirely sure of why the Gaming 7 only overclocked our i9-7900X to 4.5 GHz instead of the 4.6 GHz we know it’s capable of. It’s still a very good overclock though and gave rock solid stability throughout our testing. By the way, ignore the reported CPU vCore here, it’s clearly a false reading. We were running the latest public BIOS from the Gigabyte website and this issue has been present since the launch F5, considering Gigabyte have a well known issue with voltage stability it would be narrow minded to think that this wasnt a coincidence and that they were not trying to hide it. The closest we can get in HWinfo is the VID volts which is of no use what so ever and ads yet more weight to the fact it has been hideen. This isnt a difficult fix and screams of shady tactics. Ill gladly remove this section if they can prove me otherwise and show a proper Vcore result.