Unboxing
GIGABYTE ships the Z490 AORUS MASTER in their signature packaging with the model name in front and specs and features on the back. Suddenly I got curious why they don’t do the hero shot on the front anymore. Inside the packaging we have documentation, SATA cables, WIFI/BT antenna, a mic sensor, RGB cables and thermal probes.
Taking the motherboard out, this motherboard is surprisingly light despite the amount of material but it. The front has a I/O shroud with a large piece of glass on top while the bottom half is lined with a metal M.2 heatsink/shroud combo. This shroud sits on top of the board and there are gaps in-between it and the board meaning its a slapped on addition and not a full contact shroud. The rear has a large backplate which improves rigidity as well as improves thermal dissipation.
One of GIGABYTE’s nice innovations of recent times is their VRM fin stack heatsink. It’s been with us since the X470 days and have their roots in the X58 days but has only seen GIGABYTE employ them recently in the AORUS high-end line-up. The implementation for the Z490 AORUS MASTER is slimmer than the AORUS XTREME of this generation.
I cannot just put a finger on why I absolutely dislike this print on the I/O shroud of this board. It just looks off and rushed and does not compliment the board at all. Underneath the glass are curves that again don’t compliment the overall design of this board.
Barring the last nitpick, the metallic grey tone of the board helps pull everything together and the metallic DIMM slots not only improves looks but maintain rigidity of the slots as well. The same goes for the ATX 24 pin socket which is also reinforced.
The bottom half of the Z490 AORUS MASTER is concealed by a metal slab posing as a shroud. This is a flat aluminium assembly cut up in 3 pieces: the M.2 heatsink cover on top, M.2 heatsink cover pair on slot 2 and slot 3 and the PCH heatsink top. We feel some glass treatment could’ve been a nice addition here to complete the look but this area of the board just screams cheap.
This board support only up to 2.5G LAN. While rear USB connectors are plenty, we’re curious why GIGABYTE didn’t go with another pair of USB3.2 A+C ports. Audio is powered off an ALC1220 as well. This board supports flashing of BIOS without a CPU as well.
RGB lighting is limited to the PCH AORUS logo and the accent lines on the I/O shroud.
