Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Pro AX Review
Conclusion
What a Jekyll and Hyde motherboard the Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Pro AX is.
We’re aware that not everyone reads all of our reviews, and if you count yourself amongst those who merely look at the highlights then we definitely recommend you go back through and pay close attention. If all you did was look at the previous page with the temperatures, or the clock speed page with its 1.5V VCore, then you’d bin the Aorus Pro AX off without a second thought. Equally though, if you just looked at the benchmark graphs you’d have barely got half way through the review before heading to your local hardware emporium with credit card in hand.
The performance is unquestionable. We said in our introduction how the Pro AX has all the hallmarks of a very high end motherboard, with loads of connectivity options and high quality components throughout. Clearly if you can get it all holding together long enough for a benchmark run then there is no doubting at all how much potential you can unleash. With ALL the volts and no regard for temperatures it was regularly the fastest motherboard in our graphs. Regular readers will know that there is almost nothing separating the wheat from the chaff in motherboard terms, such is the consistency of the Intel chipset silicon. Additionally because we always use the same components and only change the item we’re testing that eliminates any variance. Thus one Z590 is, just performance wise, much the same as any other. Not with the Pro AX. When everything works it’s a complete monster, trouncing the competition.
You’re paying a ridiculously high price for all that performance though. We tried desperately to keep the temperatures tamed, but in its current form with the current BIOS it’s a choice between very average performance and barely tolerable temperatures, or insane performance only matched by the insanity of the Pro AX turning itself into a George Foreman Grill. If ever a motherboard needed weeks spent fine tuning every last element to balance on the knife edge of performance and temperatures then this is it. Equally if ever a motherboard begged for a full cover waterblock and high end cooling on every last surface this is also that motherboard. Considering that the Pro AX has the ISL69269 controller with 12 90Amp power phases of the ISL99390 variety there certainly is enough in the voltage department to keep everything running fast if you can keep it under control.
Whether you’re willing to endure the faff and expense it would take to harness the full abilities of the Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Pro AX is very much down to you. For us, we’ve given it a more than reasonable amount of time for their engineers to sort the BIOS, we’ve applied a cooling far beyond what most people would use with fans running much louder than anyone could tolerate, and it was still toasty as all hell.
High voltages, high temperatures, high performance. The Gigabyte Aorus Pro AX is not for the faint of heart, nor those who want to fit and forget. The brightest flame burns twice as fast, and we wouldn’t trust the Pro AX to last more than a week. But when it does survive long enough, oh boy is it potentially a star. It’s alternately brilliant in the performance meaning, and brilliant because it’s more luminescent than the sun.
We hesitate to give it an award because it would only encourage them to continue such a cavalier approach to their BIOS design. It’s the kind of motherboard we’d love to see doing its thing if we hadn’t brought it and our own system wasn’t reliant upon it.
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