Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme Review

Conclusion

Please note this review was written prior to the AGESA F5b BIOS update. Our graphs have been updated to reflect the new results, but the text remains the same as the fast single threaded stock performance affects so few of our results and none of our overall opinion.

We’ve already seen how impressive the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master has been, combining good looks with great performance, so how did its bigger brother the Aorus Xtreme perform?

When RGB lighting first appeared as a regular feature on motherboards each manufacturer had their own take upon the formula, with some going all in on the idea of providing headers whilst others festooned their entire PCB with lighting in every possible place. The Gigabyte Aorus take has always been one we’ve enjoyed, going for richly saturated hues and plenty of lighting options. They were also the first company to introduce a dedicated white pin for their RGB lighting which removed the blue-hued whites that are such a feature of RGB LED strips. The Aorus Xtreme is no exception to this rule, looking fantastic with a large amount of covering on the chipset and M.2 heat spreaders, and the design of those really blending in nicely. Even the extra fins that help increase the surface area and thus cooling potential all line up and it’s such small details that can really help a product stand out in a saturated marketplace. With RGB lighting also including in the blended MOSFET and IO heat sink, along with the ESS Audio EMI shield and chipset heatsink.

The heatsinks are an area that has seen varied success in recent times on the Gigabyte offerings, but there is no question at all about the abilities of the X570 Aorus Xtreme. Gigabyte have worked extremely hard designing power phases that can handle anything you demand of them and with twelve cores on the Ryzen 9 3900X those demands are high. However, the Xtreme doesn’t flinch at all and not only succeeded in pushing our Ryzen 9 3900X to new heights, with 4.4 GHz overclock across all twenty four threads, but there is obviously more available if you want to get extreme with your cooling. That’s what you get from a 16 phase 70 Amp PowIRstage design. The efforts Gigabyte have put into the VRM cooling design also pays huge dividends with a maximum of 43°C seen in our monitoring. Clearly the days when Gigabyte had pretty looking motherboards but were in a bit of no-mans-land with their power and cooling design is something in the past and they should be applauded for understanding they had an issue and not only just engineering a standard solution, but going above and beyond to over-engineer a solution that can handle any processor AMD could deliver.

The Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme isn’t just a show pony though, only good for those with exotic cooling and extreme requirements, but happily ticks along at stock too. Combine this to the huge feature set and there is much to recommend. Storage fiends are well catered for with three M.2 connectors as well as six SATA III ports. If you’ve got a lot of peripherals on hand there are more USB ports than you can shake a stick at with umpteen internal headers including a USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C, and six USB 3.1, two USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0 ports. Certainly if you’re running a streaming setup with USB headphones, microphone, Stream Deck, webcam and capture then you’ve got more than enough room left over for the peripherals necessary to game in any genre. On the subject of streaming the Aorus Xtreme has the Intel 802.11ax WiFi 6 that brings extremely high bandwidth to those lucky enough to be able to take full advantage of it, whilst the 10G LAN port does the same for those who prefer a cabled connection. There is, of course, a regular Gigabit LAN for those of us who don’t own leading edge networking hardware.

We might take slight issue with the Xtreme spelling being more appropriate to the 80s than current times, but in every other regard the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme puts Gigabyte back with the leading pack in a big way and wins our OC3D Performance Award.

  

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