Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Master Review

Conclusion

It’s been a few weeks since the launch of the 11th Generation of Intel processors and their attendant Z590 motherboards. We’ve been waiting a while to bring you our full reviews of the Gigabyte trio, whilst the engineers at Gigabyte set about sorting out their BIOS. Eventually even our patience wears out, partly because we can’t wait forever, but mainly because we know that it’s important to give you, the potential customers, enough information with which to make your purchasing decisions.

A lot of the flaws in the Z590 Aorus Master are tied in to flaws of the the Core i9-11900K. The more time we spend with it the more we’re convinced that Intel have made their first misstep in some time. It’s not as powerful as the Core i9-10900K, and the famous Intel heat management has gone out of the window. We’ve got a 360mm radiator with three 3000 RPM fans running flat out and we cannot tame the heat at all. This has a big effect on the turbo boost possibilities and if there is the slightest chink in the armour of the motherboard it’s going to get found out.

The Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Master is a motherboard that has been designed to cater to the flagship Rocket Lake CPU. The power phase is robust, built around a massive 18 phase ISL69269 controller running with 9 ISL6617 doublers giving you 18 phases of 90A ISL99390 power to ensure you can keep everything running as saturated with power as you can wish. Whilst the temperatures aren’t as low as some of the Z590 VRMs we’ve seen they are still comfortably within a level you could run all the time. However, the lack of refinement to the BIOS has meant that the results, as you have seen throughout our testing today, aren’t quite up there with the best although they are by no means bad in any way. Just consistently in the lower half.

You end up with this curious situation where the combined weaknesses of the Core i9-11900K and different weaknesses in the BIOS of the Aorus Master blend together to give you a motherboard that isn’t at its best when using the flagship 11th generation Intel CPU, but is designed to do so and thus is too expensive for too little benefit to run a lower Core i7 or Core i5 processor in it. If you plan to run the Core i9 then you really need a different motherboard, and if you don’t you might as well save your money and go with the Z590 Aorus Ultra ITX.

Maybe in time the BIOS will be tuned sufficiently that this is all a non-issue, or maybe Intel will come out with a revision of the Core i9-11900K that doesn’t do an impression of a toaster, but we have to draw the line in the sand somewhere and move on, and it’s time to do so. If money is no object and you’re committed to a high end Gigabyte motherboard there are no massive flaws keeping you from owning the Master, but keep a close eye on the BIOS update section of their website.

The Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Master has an MSRP of £409.99.

Discuss the Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Master in our OC3D Forums.