GIGABYTE Z490 AORUS Master (Intel LGA1200/Z490/ ATX/Intel 2.5G LAN/ 3xM.2 Thermal Guard/SATA 6Gb/s/ USB 3.2 Gen 2/Intel Wi-Fi 6/ESS Sabre DAC/Fins Array II/Gaming Motherboard)

First things first. This motherboard is a premium quality motherboard. Initially, my son was leaning towards the ROG Strix Z490 so we bought that. I however convinced him to give Gigabyte the chance and it did not disappoint. It was his first build and went flawlessly. So lets dig into the Pros and cons.Pros:* Compatible with 10th Gen Intel processors as well as 11th Gen ones.* Awesome quality materials including the heatsinks, headers and IO shield.* PCIe4 ready. This will make a difference in storage drives moving data around at faster rates as soon as 11th Gen Intel processors are released.* Simple and awesome bios with easy setup as well as advanced options for power users.* WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5 support.* Ample USB 2 and USB3 as well as a couple M.2 slots for your killer SSDs.Cons:* No thunderbolt built in. However, this board is Thunderbolt ready with an included Thunderbolt header on the board. You just need to purchase an add-in board if you want this.* Documentation could use a tad bit of improvement. It was a bit confusing to which 8 pin header we would connect the CPU power till we looked up a YouTube video that specifically told us to use the left one unless we had some weird cooling system needs. I believe adding such detail may help. Also, after the initial install, Bluetooth seemed flaky. Weird internet videos suggested miraculous fixes merely by unplugging the PSU and rebooting but that was not the cause. NOTE: To users running into Bluetooth not working issues, please take out the antennae included in the Aorus package and connect to your motherboard. It will fix your problems. For gigabyte, it may help if the docs had this detail in there somewhere.The final build we did had a great 1TB NVMe M.2 SK Hynix Gold SSD. Both read and write speeds were excellent. Windows installed in about 4 minutes. All systems go. A bootup takes about 10 seconds, This is not from sleep but from a powered off state. Hope you have the same experience with your build! This board rocks with Windows 10!

The media could not be loaded. The video speak for itself. No coil whine. if you are experiencing coil whine, all you have to do is go to advanced (under tweaker) in the BIOS. then go to CPU settings and disable C-States control. (this will for sure eradicate any coil whiningas for the Motherboard is concerned, this mobo has 14 phases 1 phase for GPU, 90 AMP. It has a beefy VRM and this motherboard doesn't break a sweat if you overclock it(the photos speak for itself). Unlike the MSI MEG Unify(which I had prior), the transient response and the extra heatsink due to its ARMOR made this motherboard way better when it comes to efficiency and overclocking.I highly recommend this to anyone who does NOT want to pay $800 for a high end motherboard but will still have high end features regardless (the only major difference between this and the Aorus Extreme is that the Extreme has 16 phases instead of 14 phases, every thing else is basically the same. 14 phases and 90 AMP is way overkill.The AUDIO is excellent. I no longer have to plug in my headphones at the back of the monitor(where there's a lot of electrical interference. I can plug it in the front and i still get 192,000 32 bit music, i also have access to its AMPLIFIER (front panel) which can have up to 3 levels(it's fantastic and fun, i use my sennehiser HD599 and my god, the front panel audio is excellent. It uses the ES9118 DAC which is among the better motherboard DACs out there.The internet issues were non existent. I was able to plug in my internet and it worked right away. I'm guessing in the early days of when this motherboard came out, people had problems. I got this in late september and i had no issues with the internet.

On my second z490 Aorus Master , first board had issues with the intel i-225 onboard ethernet, no matter the driver or firmware updates it just kept going Inactive, no activity lights at all. It would go active for very short periods of time,but mostly not. So I gave up and did an exchange for another and this one was smooth sailing all the way. I haven't built a pc for at least16 years so the fact that this went together so well, including updating the bios, then setting up bios, installing components, then Windows 10 and drivers. This board is straight forward and runs great with ram xmp profile. Couldn't have been easier and I couldn't be happier with this board.

Have had this MOBO replaced multiple times and they all wont boot. 1st MOBO was stuck in an endless boot cycle that never made it to post. tried switching between BIOS manually with the on board switch but it never worked. looked up the issue and there have been quite a few instances of this happening with this MOBO and the only solution was to replace it with a different one. 2nd was a replacement that ended up as "Undeliverable" by amazon stating that it was damaged. Got 3rd one ordered as replacement and received what looks like an open box item missing half of the original components and with CPU pins bent, making it worthless. Got another one from best buy locally and that one too ended up being worthless. No boots and gets stuck in a blank screen with debug code a0 - IDE initialization is startedPaying 400 for a MOBO that doesn't seem to have any QC or even being tested at manufacturing is ridiculous, and then amazon sending me a clearly used item when the original item ordered was brand new just shows you shouldn't order expensive components form amazon.