X570 AORUS MASTER Review
Overclocking and Conclusion
Unless a board is truly sub-standard, CPU overclocking between vendors is pretty much identical. The CPU clock alone doesn’t tell one much about the motherboard, unless when used with liquid nitrogen and even then, it’s not a guarantee you’ll be able to appreciate the difference as they may be entirely CPU dependant. That is to say a 5GHz CPU clock on another X570 motherboard will remain 5GHz on this board. The difference will be in the memory tuning and in the case of the AORUS X570 MASTER, the FCLK frequency.
For some reason, FCLK on this board would not exceed 1833MHz even when the uCLK/FCLK ratio is set to 1:1. It would simply revert to the half speed as per specification after this. I’m unsure why this is the case but it may be isolated to the testing BIOS and CPU combination. This can be confirmed because on at least two other motherboards, the max FCLK of 1900MHZ this CPU is capable of was no issue. Again, this is not going to matter for the vast majority of users, but if you’re into dialing in your performance for friendly or competitive overclocking you may want to be aware of this oddity at present.
That said, the X570 AORUS MASTER is efficient, able to run really tight timings with great memory bandwidth and latency efficiency. DRAM frequency past 4,000MT/s was unstable but that may have everything to do with this particular memory used for testing in combination with this motherboard rather than an inherent limitation of the board itself (This is why you should check the QVL always).
Conclusion
In GIGABYTE’s entire line up, one has to single out the X570 MASTER as one of the best if not the best in the family. Yes, the Extreme has plenty of bells and whistles but what you must pay for all that versus how much of it one actually uses doesn’t bode well for its value proposition.
Right now, the X570 AORUS MASTER is a standout board even if only for its power circuitry, yet it retails for a lot less than its direct competitors from others. The functional equivalents of this motherboard from either of these vendors retail for more, but do not offer much more. In addition to this, they all have objectively weaker power circuitry (at least on paper). Despite some short comings with this motherboard, most if not all of them are fortunately software so they can be addressed in future. However even if they are not, this remains one fine motherboard that is most certainly worth your consideration. Given the entire package of features, presentation and price, I can’t find fault with this motherboard. It may be unusual but in as far as this motherboard’s value proposition is concerned versus its peers, the X570 AORUS MASTER is worthy of the Value and more certainly Hardware award.
