Z370 AORUS Gaming 3
Reviewed by Jennifer Griffiths
Z370 AORUS Gaming 3
by Gigabyte
Reviewed by Jennifer Griffiths
Unboxing Video by Philip Griffiths
This is what Gigabyte has to say about the Motherboard
Combining passion for innovation and our expertise with over 30 years of manufacturing only the highest end technology. Gigabyte Z370 AORUS GAMING 3 delivers unbeatable features for the ultimate gaming experience.
Lag free network chips, crystal clear surround sound, stunning LED light effects, intuitive and adaptive cooling all brought together with the most robust build quality possible. Choose Gigabyte and add the ultimate weapon to your gaming arsenal.
About AORUS
AORUS, a premium gaming brand from GIGABYTE, delivering a full spectrum of the highest end gaming products. Ranging from the latest gaming motherboards, gaming laptops for VR, graphics cards, mechanical keyboards, to precision mice offering the most extreme gaming tools possible.
AORUS Range is available from (at time of Posting, depending on stock and availability),
Recommend Retail Price
Gigabyte Recommends you Retail this Product at £145
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Supports 8th Gen Intel® Core™ Processors
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Dual Channel Non-ECC Unbuffered DDR4, 4 DIMMs
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Intel® Optane™ Memory Ready
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ASMedia 3142 USB 3.1 Gen 2 with USB Type-C™ and Type-A
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Front USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C™ Header
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Multi-Way Graphics Support with PCIe Armor and Ultra Durable™ Design
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ALC1220 120dB SNR HD Audio with Smart Headphone AMP and WIMA audio capacitors
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Killer™ E2500 Gaming Network
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RGB FUSION with Multi-Zone Digital LED Light Show design, support digital LED & RGB LED strips
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Smart Fan 5 features Multiple Temperature Sensors and Hybrid Fan Headers with FAN STOP
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Dual Ultra-Fast M.2 with PCIe Gen3 x4 & SATA interface
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Anti-Sulfur Resistors Design
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Ultra Durable™ 25KV ESD and 15KV Surge LAN Protection
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Lightning-Fast Intel® Thunderbolt™ 3 AIC Support
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APP Center Including EasyTune™ and Cloud Station™ Utilities
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3 Year Warranty
What makes you think you are game worthy, Mister Aorus? Could it be that you have just the right amount of brawn, brains and bling? At one time, gamers just concentrated on if the board could get them up and running and perform half way decent. There was no need for it to look great. Oh, how times have changed, and for the better, I may add! Finally, someone out there took note of our exquisite cases and said, “What we need to make it stand out is to make a board so elegant, so appealing, one that has just what the serious gamers need and want”. And low, there was Gigabyte to the rescue!
Besides wanting to know how much memory I could put in it before causing mass nuclear meltdown (64 GB), I was eager to find out how many USB ports were on this bad boy (8), how many SATA connections it had (6). However, I was let down by not being able to SLI my NVidia cards, but, they do CrossFire if you are an AMD fan. This board supports 8th gen CPUs only. So, you will need to upgrade even if you have a socket 1151 processor, it will not be supported if it is not 8th gen. I would not consider this a bad thing though.
As far as making it an attractive board for my windowed case, they went to the sick level! The board has RGB Fusion which you can customize as you please, but that’s not all, it also can sync with your memory if it has RGB on it. How sweet is that? I would also like to add kudos on the red and black colour combo. It really did make me take notice. *Not to mention it will match perfectly with my case colours* I also like that the logo lights upon the board and the fact they made the board black, which makes everything kind of jump out and say “hello” when looking at it.
View it on Youtube
Packaging:
It is attractively packaged, looks very high end even next to other Gigabyte boards. Information on the front of the box is nicely presented but there is a lack of mention of the CrossFire unless you pick the box up and turn it over, as well as no mention of if it will SLI or not.
Unboxing:
The motherboard is in an antistatic bag as one would expect. I must note the manuals are under the card, which the motherboard sits on and not floating in/or on the antistatic bag like some. Bonus points for this. Included are 4 SATA leads, back plate (which is cushioned and not run of the mill thin tin like), G-Connector, and a sticker logo.
Judging by looks:
The board is an attractive black and red colour scheme which makes it stand out and get your attention. I like the fact that the logo on the board has the ability to light up, and the board has RGB Fusion. This lets me know that it will look ace in my case when I go to build it. There are four memory slots and eight USB ports. There is even an old school PS2 port as well as an HDMI port, an ethernet port, and 6 audio ports. They have pretty much covered anything you would need on the back of a board. I can’t think of anything they missed out on or put too little of. It is well built, looks to be quite durable, and I can tell that Gigabyte wanted to offer us enthusiasts something really nice just by looking at it.
The BIOS
The UEFI BIOS offers two operating modes, an Easy Mode, and a Classic Mode. The Classic Mode is the advanced mode with all the intricate settings for overclocking and configuring your system correctly. While there is no menu list of settings for configuring the fans, you do get a GUI graph where you can configure the fans. RGB LED support is also built into the UEFI, but it is extremely basic. The UEFI worked well and didn't seem buggy, but the red and black colour theme can be bit dark. Overall it looks like most other Gigabyte UEFIs
Overclocking
Overclocking is easy to do on these boards, you can just select in the BIOS what speed you want to run the CPU at, and you are done. If you want to get all the juice out if it that you can you can still manually. in most cases, you can easily overclock an 8700k to 5Ghz depending on cooling and quality of power supply.
We managed to get an Overclock of 5Ghz with no issues, we ran the voltage at 1.385 and set the mulitplyer to 50. that was all that we needed to do to hit 5Ghz.
Benchmarks
Our Testing System for the review:
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Motherboard: Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 3
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CPU: Intel Core i5 8700K
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Cooler: Akasa Watercooler Venom R20 RGB
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Memory: ADATA 8GB DDR4 2400 AX4U240038G16
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Card: Geforce 1080
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Case: Open-Sided testing case
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Power Supply: Cooler Master G750M 750W
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OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Professional 64 Bit
Results
As this is our first Motherboard Test, we have nothing to compare it against. But looking around online it gets around the same results as Most other Z370 boards.
CineBench R15 Single Thread = 198
CineBench R15 Multi Thread = 1417
CPU-Z Single Core = 520
CPU-Z Multi Core = 520
HandBrake FPS = 42.95
Vagas Pro Ultra HD Render (4k @ 60fps) = 16.09 Minutes.
3D Mark FireStrike = 19261
3D Mark TimeSpy = 7346
In basics. Extremely good benchmarking tests and all tests come within a witing a few points of all other motherboards with the same chipset.
The Conclusion
With the price of the board, I really would like to have had the SLI available to me. Other than this, I would say it is money well spent. If the SLI is not important to you, you will not be let down by this board.
Stand out Point
Build quality and RGB
The Pros
Attractive colour scheme,
RGB Fusion,
Supports VR,
Supports Smart Fan,
Supports CrossFire,
Plenty of USB ports,
Plenty of audio ports.
The Cons
No SLI for Nvidia cards
Mentionable but not anything to cry over:
This board is not backwards compatible with CPUs so you must have an 8th gen Intel processor for it to work. (this is the same with all z370 boards)
Would we Recommend it = Yes
So with that being said, I give the Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 3 a Platinum award.
