X570 AORUS MASTER Review

UEFI & Test configuration

General UEFI overview

GIGABYTE’s UEFI has been slightly overhauled with the launch of the X570 motherboards. Slightly because, the top and bottom of the UEFI have received HD treatment, but the rest of the UEFI is as low resolution as it’s always been. It looks like a work in progress, but the little that has changed is appreciated. The real progress with this UEFI is that it is simplified and the grouping of options is much better than it was. These are real positive strides for GIGABYTE presentation without question even though it’s got far to go.

Since this isn’t an overclocking board, there are no memory or overclocking profiles to speak of. Whatever tuning you do; you’ll have to do manually. This isn’t a negative for the CPU side of things, but is a missed opportunity on the memory side. Both ROG and ASRock offer at least three DRAM tuning profiles on their motherboards, to facilitate the lauded improved DRAM overclocking capabilities of 3^rd generation Ryzen CPUs. You are literally on your own here if you’re looking to tune memory.

The quirky bits

The rest of the UEFI is most certainly workable, but one does wish FCLK controls were placed with the rest of the options in the Tweaker tab. As it is, you’ll have to navigate your way to the AMD CBS menu and then another menu within to find these controls.

GIGABYTE has finally added a visual representation of all their Loadline Calibration settings which helps immensely. The only issue here is that there are nine settings, but only six graphs representing them in total. More over, we still have the synonymous or none descriptive such as Auto, Normal and Standard. Naturally, for a system operating at default settings all mean exactly the same thing.

We also have the Turbo, Extreme and Ultra Extreme settings, the last of which is nowhere to be seen on the representative graphs. Overall this UEFI is the best it’s been and it is more than workable but could still be improved upon by some margin. Without question the UEFI and Windows software are the Achilles heel of what is otherwise an impeccable motherboard.

Test Configuration

As always with motherboard tests, differences between boards tend to be academic for the most part. It is only in situations where there is drastic performance difference that one should be concerned. Any performance differences between boards are usually within the margin of error and as such, one should look to the numbers as performance you should expect, rather than a competition against another board with the same chipset at configured in the same manner.

You are here: Page 5 – UEFI & Test configuration

Jump to page…Page 1 – IntroductionPage 2 – HardwarePage 3 – Hardware – ContinuedPage 4 – Hardware – ConclusionPage 5 – UEFI & Test configurationPage 6 – Benchmarks – Memory bandwidth & GeekbenchPage 7 – Benchmarks – Maxxon Cinebench & Rendering testsPage 8 – Performance: CineBench and HandBrakePage 9 – Benchmarks – Game TestsPage 10 – Benchmarks – Game tests continuedPage 11 – Overclocking and Conclusion