Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming 7 WiFi Review
Conclusion
The third model in our look at the big three flagship motherboards on the new X470 platform and the Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming 7 WiFi has enough strings to its bow to make it a serious contender for your wallet.
When reviewing so many models in such a short space of time we can find it difficult to fully differentiate between them. Partly because the first release of anything always is done into a void and thus comparing it to known quantities isn’t something that’s particularly achievable – at least not without annihilating our creed of only comparing like with like wherever possible and that is not an idea we’ll give any consideration to – and partly because with a big new release we tend to get the range-topping products which usually are similar in performance. As you can see if you pay close attention to the actual numbers in our graphs rather than merely glancing at the positioning, the X470 chipset is stunningly close in every possible scenario, with very little difference between the best and the worst.
However, we think we can look at trends, and the trend of the Gigabyte was definitely one in which the stock performance was a highlight. Much like when we looked at the MSI M7 it wasn’t always at the top of the overclocked charts but if any board was it was that one, so the Gigabyte isn’t always the fastest stock board in our graphs but when there was a gap to be had between the stock setups the gap usually benefited the Gigabyte Gaming 7. If there is a motherboard you could install and forget and still extract a lot of performance from your new Ryzen 7 CPU then this is it. Youd have to ignore some glaring voltage issues going on behind the scenes though so its almost a stock board for those of you that literally dont care about how many volts the board is pumping into your £300 CPU.
One area where Gigabyte clearly takes home all the laurels is the lighting. Instead of going for an RGB logo and maybe an RGB accent, the Aorus Gaming 7 commits fully to the RGB theme and lights up pretty much everywhere, in richly saturated hues of stupendous brightness. When we brought you the preview a few commenters mentioned how they felt that the orange accents on the Gaming 7 distracted from the concept of an RGB motherboard. In actuality the orange is so subtle and the lighting so bright that this is an absolute non issue. Even in our test system we struggled to see the orange when the lights were on, and that’s a brightly lit office in which we’re paying very close attention to everything because we’re testing it. In a dark closed case in the corner of your study/bedroom/office you’ll almost never notice the orange unless you’re looking for it, and if you’re looking for it instead of basking in the glory of the lighting and the performance then you’re totally missing the point.
Lastly we have to give credit to Gigabyte for going back to the drawing board and finally fixing, once and for all, their cooling issues. The X470 Aorus Gaming 7 WiFi remains cool whether overclocked or stock, and at no point did we run into any thermal issues at all. Even better the old-school heatsinks look the business. Who doesn’t love a monster fin density.
Sadly though, as ever Gigabyte have been let down by their BIOS team and this is really down to their load line calibration issues again. We must have reported this at launch for the last 10 releases and if we are honest we are bored of keep having to go on about it. It took their R&D guys 5 days to even bother to replicate it after our initial report and request for them to try and get it sorted. We do this to try and help them make sure YOU guys get the best possible product when you buy it but yet again they are happy to let you guys buy something that hardware wise awesome, yet firmware wise substandard. Because of this attitude they do not get an award and till that BIOS gets fixed we would say in all honesty dont buy it. When it is rectified we will retest and report back but it has taken them months to fix issues in the past so if you have to make a decision now and your finger needs to click ‘buy’ we would advise pick something else. They should have had a better BIOS covering the basics at launch. Rant over.
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