Gigabyte Z490 Aorus Pro AX Preview
Up Close – Overview and Power
The combination of brushed metal finish and reinforced DIMM and PCI Express slots catch the eye on an otherwise monochrome motherboard. Nearly every motherboard these days is all black so as to better show off our RGB Lighting choices.
At the top end the RGB logo on the IO/Heatsink combo is covered with plastic to keep it free from fingerprints, but otherwise the layout is nice and clean. The reason for the slightly smaller than we’ve seen so far north heatsink will become apparent in a moment.
The bottom half combines some M.2 heatspreaders and reinforced PCI Express slots into a very attractive setup. The “limited functionality” sticker might be intriguing, but the fact that “reserved for future” is printed onto the PCB definitely piques our curiosity.
We’ve seen quite a variety of power solutions on the Z490 motherboards so far, with some having 90A and some 70A. The Gigabyte Aorus Pro AX goes for direct 12 Phases Digital VRM Solution with 50A DrMOS. Without having tested any of them yet it’s slightly confusing for us. Either the 90A models are totally over-engineered or this is underpowered. We weren’t sure why the core counts we’re expecting from the new Intel CPUs would demand 90A power, so we think it’s probably the former.
On the subject of power at the top left we have a single case fan header sitting next to the 8+4 CPU 12V power input.
