Gigabyte X670E Aorus Master Preview

Introduction

It's fair to say that things have been pretty quiet on the hardware front in recent months. One would have imagined that the pandemic would've stopped stuff then and there, but if anything it has shown the sort of lead times involved in R&D. So whilst the first half of 2022 was quieter than a church mouse in slippers, the end of the year, and the final quarter in particular, is going to be mental.

What better way to start off than with some new hardware from AMD. After all, the resurgence of AMD brought massive benefits to consumers in terms of availability of quality hardware and lower prices in a non-monopoly. Although they try and stick with the same socket for as long as possible - AM4 up to now - there are enough new technologies around, and new ideas in their processor designs, that a new socket was the only way forwards and so now the AM5 is here.

You've already seen how the 7000 series of processors perform, and once we've completed testing all four CPUs we'll move on to motherboard comparisons. We know you're all eager beavers though, so whilst details are somewhat thin on the ground for certain models, and there are some things we're not allowed to tell you at the time of writing*, we'll start off with some motherboard previews.

* we find writing our reviews live as you read them to be too stressful, so these are always written pre-launch when some information is held back from us.

Technical Specifications

If there is one thing we love from the modern design philosophy of motherboards is how modular they are. Power stages, manufacturer specific features, board design and the all-important customisation and lighting effects are all transferrable from one board to another. It means that we can focus upon what is actually new, rather than showing you things of which you are already aware. The AM5 X670E Aorus Master is the perfect example of this. 16+2+2 105A power stages are similar to those we saw on recent Intel motherboards. It's great to see AM5 finally bringing together all the 5s though with PCI Express 5.0, DDR5 and.. Smart Fan 6. Oh. Okay some of the 5s then.

Specification pages are all well and good, but let's do what we're really here for and show you it in the flesh.