Gigabyte X370 Aorus Gaming 5 Aorus Review

Conclusion

The Gigabyte X370 Gaming 5 is, to use a British idiom, a game of two halves. Throughout our testing two things became abundantly clear.

Firstly, the stock performance is a tiny bit disappointing. Normally with stock motherboards running processors at stock settings etc you get a bunch of results that are all but identical. With minor variances this means that there is as much chance of one being the best/worst as there is of any other filling that spot. However, barring a couple of tests the Aorus was consistently at the bottom of our graph. Obviously we have to point out that it is only going up against one other motherboard, because these are early days of Ryzen. And we also have to say that the actual numbers are very tightly matched. Just not so tightly matched that the Gaming 5 ever overtakes the ASUS Prime. But, that brings us neatly to the second point.

The overclocking capabilities of the X370 Gaming 5 are very good indeed. In recent years this has been becoming a small weak spot in Gigabyte motherboards as their hardware is never quite backed up by the BIOS necessary to make the most of it. Considering how early we are into the Ryzen lifespan then the 4.1 GHz overclock and 3200 MHz DDR4 really made up sit up and take notice. Better yet, the actual results backed up this higher level of performance than we obtained on the ASUS Prime. Sometimes you can have a monster CPUz and yet the results don’t bear out the clockspeed. The Gaming 5 has no such worries, pushing big scores everywhere you looked. Yes, that includes gaming performance.

All of which means that if you want to tinker under the hood with your new Ryzen 7 1800X then the Gaming 5 is very capable. You’re not even having to compromise with the looks or pricing either, as the Gaming 5 looks fantastic with the ice white heatsinks standing out starkly from the black PCB and giving you a canvas to make the most from the excellent Aorus lighting to really stamp your personality on your system, thankfully considering how many lights there are on the board you can also completely turn them off too. Add this to the inclusion of all the features that we’ve come to expect from Intel motherboards but have been found somewhat lacking on recent AMD efforts and it is obvious that the fantastic architecture change isn’t the only big boon to have come from AMDs R&D department, but that the chipset side of things has received an equally large shot in the arm bringing us DDR4 and M.2 storage with NVME. 

Negatives are tiny. We’d like a couple more fan headers, as well as a dedicated pump header. We’re also slightly concerned about the placement of the M.2 slot, particularly given their propensity to slow down when they get extra toasty. We’d also like a little more performance from it at stock settings, especially when so many people still use the “plug in and go” method of system building, this will most likely come with bios updates and we pray to the silicone gods that the Gigabyte engineers dont ruin these boards with half arsed ‘fixes’.  We have had enough of it keep happening and having to guide end users around their incompetencies to do basics tasks like set an acceptable stock Vcore. Chinese new year is over now boys, get back to doing some proper work. The Gaming 5 is great, lets see if you can make it better not worse.

However, those tiny issues don’t detract from the overall impression of the Gigabyte X370-Gaming 5 Aorus as a very capable motherboard with some excellent features allied to great overclocking performance, hence it winning our OC3D Performance Award. Now just dont ruin it with bad BIOS updates like you did the Z270 boards.

Ifd you are intere4sted in trying the F3F Bios you can download it from us here

  

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