GIGABYTE Z490 AORUS Ultra (Intel LGA1200/Z490/ATX/Intel 2.5G LAN/3xM.2 Thermal Guard/SATA 6Gb/s/USB 3.2 Gen 2/Intel Wi-Fi 6//Realtek ALC1220-VB/RGB Fusion/Gaming Motherboard)

This is the 3rd Z490 Motherboard I have used (I build custom gaming pcs on the side) and it is now my "go-to" for the chipset. The first build I did my customer wanted all white components so I went with an ASUS Z490-A Strix motherboard and I had no problems with it but it just seemed lacking for the price. I decided to put together a new gaming build for myself and I wanted to try the Aorus board this time. Right away I felt like the board was much higher quality that the ASUS and I appreciate the fact that it has 3x M.2 that all have heatsinks (unlike the ASUS). The board is performing very well and looks amazing in my black/silver build. I loved the Aorus Z390 Ultra and so far the Z490 Ultra has not disappointed. No issues at all and I could not be happier. I am not usually willing to spend much more than $300 for a motherboard and I do do any heavy overclocking and this board pairs perfectly with my 10700K

Bad hype over the years scared me away from Gigabyte but it was always the same 2 lame reasons, complicated bios & buggy software. Neither is true nor impactful in anyway. The especially strong vrm's with good quality make this board the best I've ever used. First, the bios is a little harder to navigate than some but if your not a hardcore overclocker than you won't need all that & if you are then you'll not likely notice. My DRGB looks great but not why a select a particular board. This board is solid & has M2 heatsinks which look great along with the RGB. Tons of USB ports. Also when I installed my M.2 SSD with win 10 pro with all my programs & ran the driver disk, it just booted up & worked with win 10 still activated & my old board was an MSI. I have nothing bad to say about this board but will amend my review if warranted.

this motherboard is awsome easy set up,bios is a snap i have no cons about this board. my setup is i7 10700k, ek water cooler,this mobo, 32gb trident z neo, 500gb samsung 970 evo nvme, 256gb team nvme, 2tb seagate hdd, 500gb 860 evo sdd,zotac rtx 3070, 650 watt corsair psu, evga dg-76 case all from here on amazon!

I bought this board to use with my new I7-10700k. Initially, I was a bit skeptical about Gigabyte, just because I have always stood by ASRock for good mid-range boards. This board looks great, and has all the features I was looking for, and what you would expect from a Z490 board. I'm not a super duper tech savvy guy when it comes to ALL the features of the board, so I will stick with what I know.Pros:Nice lighting on the board, and overall great looking boardAll the Sata ports (6) and M.2 ports that I need (3 if you count the PCIE x16 likely taken by GPU tho)Arrived with zero defects!Easy setup overall! Had everything up and running with little effort overall* See below for more on this..Cons:1) I couldn't find anywhere in the instructions that mention this, but by default the board is configured to dump you off with an error just after the Aorus logo appears (nothing to boot to). I had Win10 Pro on an SSD, and another regular HDD plugged in, but the system didnt recognize them. This was worrisome, as I expected it to boot straight to Windows. The logical solution is to go into the bios and click the boot sequence, but the system didn't show anything there. Ill spare the other details but long story short, you have to go into the CSM settings, and enable Legacy options to boot to... When you do that, save and restart, you can then go back into the bios and set the boot priority, and it was pretty much smooth sailing from there. My complaint here is there being no mention of this procedure.2) CPU VOLTAGE..... This one really bothers me, and is the entire reason I dropped a star.. After doing some tests in a couple CPU demanding games (Planet Coaster, and Total War: Rome 2), everything was quite stable, and temps were sitting at a cool 54C max... Using CPU-Z, Real-Temp, and Hardware Monitor, I noticed though that my VCORE Voltage was spiking as high as 1.66V !?!?!??! That seems a bit insane to me... Im shocked that my temps werent higher. By default the Aorus Ultra board sets the VCore to an adaptive mode, and I feel that it is WAY over generous with that... However, I will say that it is VERY easy to fix.. Just go into the Bios and disable the adaptive voltage and set it to say 1.35-1.38V and try that as a fixed voltage, or if you prefer, mess with the LLC's and offsets to remedy depending on your comfort level. It upset me that they would ship out a board in a configuration that could relatively quickly kill your CPU if left alone (at least in my understanding). I get that some silicon performs better than others and such, but 1.66V?!?! even 1.5 is too much lol I'm not even comfortable with anything above 1.4V, regardless of temps.Overall I am quite happy with the board, and would absolutely recommend it to anyone out there! Just make a quick decision on how to remedy the adaptive Vcore situation. Money well spent! If you haven't used a Gigabyte board before, be ready for a bit of a learning curve with the bios. There is a LOT to play with :), but thats a + in my book. It looks great, and so far performs great!