Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Pro Review

Up Close

When you see as many boxes as we do it's amazing how a little colour can go a long way to making something stand out. Heck, look at the background of this shot and you can see the type of packaging we're normally stuck with. The Aorus Pro goes all in and we love it.

There isn't much flair in the heatsink design. Gigabyte have instead plumped for the regulation straight edges and slashes design that was so prominent not that long ago. Someone buy the designer a compass or French Ruler.

The lower end continues the 'all straight lines all the time' formula from the top half. It's consistent if nothing else, even though it isn't remotely as attention grabbing as the packaging made us hope. It's not bad, it's just a bit bland.

At the top left we find, as always, a pair of 12V ATX power inputs. In the case of the Pro it's an 8+4 arrangement to ensure smooth delivery to your Alder Lake CPU.

Both the CPU fan headers are nicely positioned exactly where you need them for simple cable routing. It's also noteworthy that the Aorus Pro has eschewed the white RGB headers and gone with black ones. Nice if you don't need them and want to keep your system looking clean.

The bottom corner has the SATA ports, CMOS battery, front panel connectors, reset switch and the all-important four fan headers that help you keep your system cool. With more and more of us utilising both front and floor intake fans having so many here is a nice touch.

The bottom left will be familiar to anyone who has seen a recent motherboard, whether it's the front panel USB headers, RGB and Addressable RGB headers, or just the front panel audio, this is the one area where most motherboard designs are in tune.

A closer look at the many stacks that form the VRM cooling section heatsinks, with the 16+1+2 90A power stages hiding beneath.