Review of the Gigabyte X299 AORUS MASTER Motherboard

After the launch of the consumer grade Intel 9th Generation Processors and the new Z390 chipset, Intel continues their stride with a refreshed line-up of the X-series processors. Announced in October and launched in November 2018, the new Skylake X Refresh processors are based on the same Intel Skylake architecture, but with an enhanced 14nm fabrication process. This has allowed Intel to further bump up the frequencies of these processors for their whole lineup. Motherboard manufacturers are not late in the game, as many of them have released newer versions of X299 motherboards to enhance their current motherboard lineup. Gigabyte has released their new X299 AORUS MASTER motherboard to welcome the new Skylake X Refresh processors as well. As we understand, the AORUS MASTER branding is only accredited to a high-end product. While the X299 platform is already considered to be a High-End Desktop platform, what can we expect from Gigabyte from its highest-end product? Let's hope they won't disappoint us.

Introduction to Gigabyte X299 AORUS MASTER

Specifications

Specifications
CPU Support	Support for Intel Core X series 44-Lane/28-lane processors (6-core or above) in the LGA 2066 package
Package	LGA2066
Chipset	Intel X299 Express Chipset
Memory	8 x DDR4 DIMM sockets supporting up to 128GB of system memorySupport up to DDR4 4000(O.C)
Onboard Graphics	NIL
Audio	Realtek ALC1220-VB CodecESS ES9218K2M DAC High Definition Audio 2/4/5.1/7.1 channel output Supports S/PDIF Out
LAN	1 x Realtek GbE LAN (10/100/1000/2500 Mbit)1 x Intel GbE LAN
Wireless	Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Dual Band (867Mbps) Bluetooth 4.2
Storage	3 x M.2 slots (2 x supports both SATA and PCIe, 1 x support only PCIe)8 x SATA 6Gbps
Form Factor	E-ATX Form Factor; 30.5 cm x 26.9cm

PCIe and M.2 Expandability (Top to bottom)

PCI Express x 16 slots
PCIe Gen3 x4 (Type 22110)
PCI Express x 8 slots
PCIe Gen3 x4 (Type 22110)
PCI Express x 16 slots
PCIe Gen3 x4 (Type 22110)
PCI Express x 8 slots

The SSDs placed in the M.2 slots also supports RAID 0,1,5,10 as well. The motherboard supports NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFire technologies. As the X299 and X-series processors are created for HEDT (High-end Desktop) systems, there are plenty PCIe bandwidth for multi-graphics card compatibility. This means that each installed graphics card for dual CrossFire/SLI setups will be able to enjoy the full bandwidth of PCIe x16 that it truly deserves. The second and fourth PCIe slots still runs at PCIe x8, but still opens up the capabilities of the motherboard to run up to four graphics card at once. Such configurations will be useful for scientists seeking for GPU compute capabilities placed in a ATX desktop form factor.

Input/Output Interfaces

From Left to Right, Top to Bottom:

Power Button
Clear CMOS Button
2 x USB 3.0 Ports
1 x USB 3.1 Port Type A
1 x USB 3.1 Port Type C
RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet Port
2 x USB 3.0 port
RJ45 2.5Gigabit Ethernet Port
2 x USB 3.0 port
Wi-Fi Antenna Ports
7.1 Audio Jacks and SPDIF OUT

The integrated I/O shield design is also welcomed, as it makes system building slightly more convenient.

SATA 6Gbps Interfaces

The motherboard also comes with 8 x SATA 6Gbps ports.

Motherboard Design and Features

Aesthetics

Gigabyte used to make contrasting colour themes for their motherboards. With the introduction of RGB lighting on motherboard in the past years, they have toned the design down with a more monochromatic theme. This allows the RGB lights to take the spotlight, accentuating the logo and branding of Gigabyte/AORUS.

The shiny metallic gray for the heat sinks is well paired with the base black PCB. From what we understand, having the black PCB is more than just a choice for aesthetics, since the colour is also better at radiating heat. This keeps the computer system cooler than motherboards that uses other colours. Based on our first impression, the X299 AORUS MASTER motherboard exudes a ferocious look, which could be great for system builders who are particular with aesthetics and want to build a powerful gaming machine. Luckily, the X299 AORUS MASTER was designed with just the right amount of RGB lighting. These lighting zones are placed at the VRM, audio chipset and X299 chipset areas.

Power Design

As the new Skylake X Refresh lineup comes with a 18 core/ 36 thread processor that is rated at 165W TDP, the motherboard should be sufficiently equipped with the right power circuitry to enable a reliable setup. This is why the X299 AORUS MASTER motherboard is designed with a 12 phase digital CPU power design and equipped with a digital PWM controller. During the initial launch of the Skylake X and X299 chipset 1.5 year back, many motherboard manufacturers have been slammed for providing sub-par power design on the motherboard that failed to provide adequate power delivery to the new HEDT processors. Famous overclocker Der8auer showed that many motherboards experienced VRM throttling, limiting the true potential of the whole system. The X299 AORUS MASTER motherboard was designed with extra care with regards to that incident. In fact, it was created to over-provide the electrical requirements of the platform and processors. For a start, we saw that the motherboard is equipped with 2 x 8 pin CPU Power Connector that ensures sufficient power can be drawn from the Power Supply without exceeding the 8pin connector's recommended rate. An additional 6 pin power connector can also be seen next to the SATA connectors to further provide power to hungry PCIe devices such as video cards.

Furthermore, the motherboard was manufactured on a thicker copper layer PCB design. This lowers the impedance and power loss on the power and ground layer, resulting in better power efficiency and cooling. Even though users will not feel too much of a difference for their day to day use, such small differentiation factors could cause significant effects in extreme overclocking scenarios when each component of the whole system is pushed to their limits.

Thermal/Cooling Designs

To effectively cool the various components on the motherboard, Gigabyte has improved their heatsink design on the X299 AORUS MASTER. They are using a fin-array heatsink design which can increase the rate of heat dissipation. Understanding that the VRM can get hot when the system draws a large amount of power, they have even included a fan within the heatsink to improve the airflow. However, we noticed that this fan is placed within a small space under the VRM/IO shroud. We are unsure whether the fan will be able to bring sufficient airflow within the confined space for the cooling solution to be effective. Moreover, the fan will also bring about more dust to the fin-array heatsink in the long run.

Other than the VRM heatsinks, each individual M.2 slot also has its dedicated heatsink. This ensures that all M.2 SSDs will not face any performance issues due to high temperatures. To further improve the cooling performance, the X299 AORUS MASTER is also equipped with a thermal baseplate that can cool components that are found on the back of it. Also, this toughened baseplate also prevents the motherboard from warping from extreme temperatures or physical pressure. Overall, the durability of the whole motherboard is improved via this design.

Durability Features

It is almost standard that all high-end motherboards are all equipped with strengthened connectors, ports and slots. The X299 AORUS MASTER is equipped with

Solid pin power connectors
Ultra Durable PCIe Armor
Ultra Durable Memory Armor

These additional features further improves the durability of the motherboard, especially at places where the motherboard interfaces with other components. It helps in preventing damage to the motherboard due to excessive pressure.

Enhanced Built-In Audio

Gone were the days when system builders condemn integrated on-board audio as poor quality. With improvements in technology, motherboard manufacturers are getting better at including high grade audio components onto the motherboard for audio performance that are comparable to dedicated sounds cards. Gigabyte had spent extra effort in placing good audio hardware on their motherboard. Specifically for the X299 AORUS XTREME, they have selected specialized components that are known to provide excellent audio experience for users. For audio signal processing, the digital and analogue signals are converted and processed by the ESS 9218 Sabre DAC. This DAC is rated with a 130dB SNR. The signals are then passed through high quality audiophile grade capacitors and out from the gold plated audio jacks to ensure that the audio comes out in its truest form.

2.5 Gigabit Ethernet LAN

The X299 AORUS MASTER also comes with an multi-gigabit ethernet port that can run up to speeds of 2.5Gbps. While Gigabyte has proclaimed that it is designed for better online gaming experience, we believe that such a feature will also benefit for productivity work as well for things such as transferring massive amount of files between servers. However, do take note that your networking equipment must also support the 2.5Gbps (or higher) speed to capitalize on this specialized Gigabit Ethernet port. We find that the 2.5Gbps port is good to have, but probably not essential as most users would likely need to have an expensive 10Gbps network switch to support it. In this case, they would rather have a 10Gbps ethernet port instead.

Motherboard Software

Even though the X299 AORUS MASTER motherboard does comes with a wide range of utilities to support and enhance various functions on the motherboard, we will focus on three main software. They are namely the RGB Fusion, Easy Tune and the motherboard's BIOS.

RGB Fusion

With the recent launch of the RGB Fusion 2.0 software, users are finally able to synchronize LED effects across all supported products. The software is rather straightforward to use - users have to simply select the connected device and choose its preferred RGB colour and effect to apply it, or alternatively synchronize an effect across all devices. However, the software is still rather new, and is lacking in the flexibility of synchronizing only specific selected components. Synchronization can only be done for all, or individually. Perhaps a newer version of the software in the future could bring in more features, effects and flexibility to the control of RGB components.

EasyTune

The Gigabyte EasyTune software is a system tuning software that makes it simple for users to overclock their systems. The Smart Boost section helps out less advanced users by applying different system profiles to cater to their needs. It's a fuss free and guaranteed way for them to maximize various PC attributes under different usage scenarios. There is even an auto-tuning feature that can help determine the best possible overclock for the system depending on the cooling systems installed. For more advanced users, instead of going into the system BIOS, various CPU, Memory and Power settings can also be set within the EasyTune software. However, there may be many instances where system restarts are required in order for a settings to be applied. The list of settings available are quite comprehensive, and should be more than sufficient for most users. However, if you need to make more specialized changes to the systems, these settings will still be available via the motherboard's UEFI BIOS.

BIOS

Gigabyte has designed a simple to use BIOS for the X299 AORUS MASTER motherboard. Firstly, the Easy Mode is a simple Graphical Interface that shows the key important details and vitals of the system. Users can also choose between different system profile modes to use, similar to those found on the EasyTune software. For more advanced users, they can make use of the classic view, which covers all the available settings on the motherboard. Under the M.I.T. tab, overclockers can easily change the settings to increase the performance on their device. However, we noticed that the menu categories for M.I.T. tab are divided by subject matter, instead of functional means. This causes a need to do constant back and forth navigation on the BIOS when focusing on overclocking a specific computer component. For example, if we would want to increase the CPU multiplier and CPU voltage, we would have to

Visit the "Advanced Frequency Settings" menu
Increase the CPU multiplier
Exit the page
Enter "Advanced Voltage Settings" menu
Change the voltage of the VCORE

This excessive navigation could have been avoided if the voltage settings were simply just placed into the menu of each functional area. The BIOS also allow users to change the settings of their fan curves. They can either choose to manually define the fan profile, or set it to the defined presets available. Overall, there isn't anything much lacking on the motherboard's BIOS, and we were able to easily find the different settings required for our overclocks and setup. However, we do think that Gigabyte need to take a further look into the navigation design of this user interface.

Testing Methodology and Performance Benchmarks

Testing Objectives and Setup

Similar to our previous motherboard reviews, we will be putting the Gigabyte X299 AORUS MASTER motherboard to the test under different usage scenarios. We will also test the system performance based on its individual components and seek out for anomalies and positive results that are worth mentioning. Additionally, we will also give some stress to the motherboard by overclocking the CPU for this test. Since the quality of the motherboard can contribute to the stability of the overclock, we can if the X299 AORUS MASTER performs as expected.

Specs	Main System
CPU	Intel Core i9-7900X
RAM	AORUS RGB Memory 3200MHz CL16-18-18-38 4 x 8GB DDR4 Kit
Storage	Plextor M8V M.2 SATA SSD 256GB
GPU	PALIT GameRock GeForce GTX 1070
Motherboard	Gigabyte X299 AORUS MASTER
CPU Cooler	Cooler Master Seidon 120XL
OS	Windows 10 Pro 64 bit
Drivers	NVIDIA 417.35

Performance Results

General Performance Testing

Futuremark PCMark 10

PCMark 10 Extended provides organizations with a complete assessment of system performance beyond typical office work tasks. It also includes demanding graphics and physics tests that focus on GPU and CPU performance. [caption id="attachment_16570" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]

https://www.3dmark.com/pcm10exb/51247[/caption]

WebXPRT 2015

WebXPRT 2015 uses scenarios created to mirror the tasks you do every day to compare the performance of almost any Web-enabled device. It contains six HTML5- and JavaScript-based workloads: Photo Enhancement, Organize Album, Stock Option Pricing, Local Notes, Sales Graphs, and Explore DNA Sequencing.

Passmark Performance Test

PassMark PerformanceTest benchmarks a PC performance using 32 standard benchmark tests in five test suites.

CPU tests Mathematical operations, compression, encryption, physics.
2D graphics tests Vectors, bitmaps, fonts, text, and GUI elements.
3D graphics tests DirectX 9 to DirectX 12 in 4K resolution. DirectCompute & OpenCL
Disk tests Reading, writing & seeking within disk files + IOPS
Memory tests Memory access speeds and latency

CPU Performance

Cinebench R15

CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software Cinema 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation.

SuperPi

Super PI is a single threaded benchmark that calculates pi to a specific number of digits. It uses the Gauss-Legendre algorithm to compute pi to 2³² digits.

7-Zip

7-Zip is a free and open-source file archiver. The benchmark determines the speed of the system compressing and decompressing of archives with LZMA methods.

Memory Performance

AIDA64

AIDA64 is a system information, diagnostics, and auditing application developed by FinalWire Ltd. It includes a memory benchmark test which shows the system’s memory latency and speed.

Storage Performance

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program measures sequential and random read/write speeds.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO Disk Benchmark is a widely used software used to measure storage system performance. It runs various read and write tests with different test data to see performance of the disk under different scenarios.

AS SSD Benchmark

The AS SSD benchmark determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains six synthetic and three copy tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are performed without using the operating system cache. In the sequential test, the program measures how long it takes to read and write a 1 GB file. In the 4K test, read and write performance is determined for randomly selected 4K blocks.

Synthetic Graphics Performance

3DMark Firestrike

Fire Strike is a showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for today’s high-performance gaming PCs. It is our most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today. [caption id="attachment_16580" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]

https://www.3dmark.com/fs/17727965[/caption]

3DMark Timespy

3DMark Time Spy is a new DirectX 12 benchmark test for Windows 10 gaming PCs. Time Spy is one of the first DirectX 12 apps to be built “the right way” from the ground up to fully realize the performance gains that the new API offers. With DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, Time Spy is the ideal test for benchmarking the latest graphics cards. [caption id="attachment_16581" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]

https://www.3dmark.com/spy/5671841[/caption]

Gaming Performance

Rise of the Tomb Raider (1080p High Settings)

Assassin's Creed Odyssey (1080p, High Settings)

Far Cry 5 (1080p, High Settings)

Final Fantasy XV (1080p, High Settings)

World of Tanks (1080p, Ultra Settings)

The X299 AORUS MASTER was able to complete all the tests without any hiccups. The motherboard handled the 10-core processor with ease, and there weren't any anomalies detected. Benchmarking the system was a breeze, and the system ran stably. Could this still be the case when we push the CPU to an overclocked state?

Overclocking

By bumping up the CPU VCORE, we managed to increase the base turbo frequency of the Core i9 7900X from 4.3GHz to 4.7GHz. Once we made sure that the system was stable, we ran Cinebench R15 benchmark again to determine the performance improvements on this system. The score had increased from the initial 2173 to 2457. This is about an 11.5% increase in performance.

More importantly, we also ran a stress test on the system to make sure that there weren't any sort of VRM throttling on the system. With IntelBurnTest, we saw the VRM temperature rise to a maximum of 65 degree Celsius. This is considered to be rather fine and acceptable. Moreover, even under such stressful usage scenario where the motherboard is pulling significant current from the main power source, there were no signs of throttling. This means that the X299 AORUS MASTER is capable of reliably sustaining a high overclock even under load.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

The GIGABYTE X299 AORUS MASTER has certainly got what it takes to reliably handle any LGA 2066 HEDT processors thrown at it. Its many high quality components and features sets itself apart from leading competitions in the market. Moreover, we have also tested the motherboard to work very well in overclocked scenarios, thanks to its well designed power circuitry. It would be a great choice for consumers looking at building a new workstation system with the new Skylake X Refresh processors. However, we also noted that the X299 is considered to be an aging chipset which is due for an update. Perhaps, it would make more sense to wait for the new HEDT class chipset from Intel, or simply opt for an Z390 system which supports up to an 10-core 20 threads Core i9 processor as well. Nonetheless, if you are looking at a new high-end X299 motherboard, the GIGABYTE X299 AORUS MASTER is certainly one serious contender.