Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 7 Review

Conclusion

The Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 7 has proven to be a slightly befuddling motherboard during our time with it.

There is no denying at all that there is a huge amount of potential within it. The BIOS is easy to use as all Gigabyte BIOS are in recent times, and clearly as you saw from our overclocking results the raw clock speed numbers are unquestionably there. We’ve only reviewed the main flagship motherboards from the big three brands so far but the Gaming 7 put out the biggest number, which is enough to leave an impression however you slice it. What leaves us slightly confused is that our test overclock was pretty much on a par with the other motherboards we’ve tested yet the results didn’t quite bear that out.

Don’t get us wrong, this isn’t remotely bad in any way, shape, or form. The differences we’re talking about are a point or two here and there, barely outside error tolerances. However, there is no denying that as a whole, on average, it did always end up a hairs breadth behind the ASUS Maximus Hero and MSI Godlike in both stock and overclocked trim. It put out the biggest overclock. Had the same test overclock as the others, just never translated that into performance. You would expect there to be some variance in the results because all the motherboards we’ve looked at today are so tightly packed. Half a percent can be the difference between first and not first. But the Gaming 7 never reached first in any of our benchmarks. We don’t understand it, but we have to report the facts and those are they.

Away from the performance though – which once again we must emphasise we’re talking microscopic margins here – there is much to love about the Aorus Gaming 7. Gigabyte have done a complete turn around from the products they were releasing a few generations ago and the Aorus range has been a particular highlight. With huge feature sets, high build quality, reliability and what we think is the finest implementation of the RGB lighting phenomenon around there is a lot to recommend it. The full set of high bandwidth elements are here and the choices Gigabyte have made for their Audio are worthy of particular praise.

The aesthetics are very fine, with brushed black finishes everywhere and some subtle silver highlights to give form to what is, after all, a rectangular item. What stands out particularly though is that lighting. Even if you don’t own a 300 Digital LED bundle to really let your creativity run riot, you’ll be thrilled just with what happens on the PCB itself. If you do happen to have the requisite items then there is no doubt that the Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 7 will bring the most sizzle and the flashiest light shows to any system.

We have no doubt that as it matures the full nature of the latent performance within the Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 7 will push this even higher in our estimation, but even in its current form it is worthy of our OC3D Performance Award.

   

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