Aorus Z690 Pro Motherboard Review

When I do any product review I make a point of starting the review cold by not reading too much into the specs or checking out what other reviewers are saying.  That helps me remain neutral in my thoughts with the intention of providing an honest review.

However, when you have been reviewing products for a long as I have there are certain things that I often assume will be there and later come to expect.  A good example of this would be the items that come included with every product.  There was a time when you would get a cable for EVERY connection on the motherboard, the manual was extremely detailed and the quick start guide was actual useful.  It would seem that times are changing and the product offerings are getting more closely aligned to how users ACTUALLY use these products

In this review we looked at the Z690 Aorus Pro Motherboard from Aorus Gaming (from Gigabyte).  This board is built on the Intel Z690 chipset supporting the new LGA 1700 Alder Lake line of processors.  With this new processor we get a number of new and exciting features including PCI Express 5.0, DDR5 and Hybrid CPU Cores which mark an elemental shift in system architecture that is not only more powerful but, quite power efficient.

Along with these new motherboard features we also have ongoing changes in the DIY PC market that has changed how these products are being used.  For instance, NVIDIA has removed support for SLI and as a response you will likely never see a motherboard with nicely spaced PCI Express 16x slots supporting dual graphics cards.  The Z690 Aorus Pro supports AMD Crossfire but, in all reality any user buying this motherboard will only ever has a single graphics card.

Audio has played an interesting part in motherboard development and in an attempt to make motherboard products more attractive they started to include onboard audio.  True audiophiles always installed a discrete audio processor but, the option was always there to use the onboard sound.  With the Z690 Aorus Pro you still get an onboard audio option but is limited to two analog connections and a digital connection that has never been used on a gaming PC (read: optical).

I suspect that Gigabyte included the audio processor because they had to but have realized that gamers are using USB headsets now which completely bypass the onboard audio solution.

From a performance standpoint the new Z690 and Intel Core i7 12700k are pretty amazing.  The new CPU comes with 16-cores split across two profiles in a hybrid configuration.  Performance cores handle high-performance loads such as gaming and running benchmarks while the efficiency cores are designed to be power efficient and handle low demand and background activities.  Together they create an efficient package that seamlessly integrates the performance patterns without having to massively alter the CPU Frequency and lowering overall latency.

The Z690 Aorus Pro Gaming motherboard was able to deliver an amazing default and overclocking performance and remained extremely stable throughout my testing.  I would eventually like to see what kinds of performance I can get from DDR5 @ 6200Mhz though that would require the use of LN2 and this motherboard isn’t designed for that sort of activity.  It is nice that the support is there, even if it will never be taken advantage of.

Overall, I have a mixed feeling about the Z690 Aorus Pro Gaming motherboard.  This is a full ATX motherboard with features that could be better served on a Micro ATX or Mini ITX platform.  These include the lack luster, and yet still pretty good, onboard audio solution along with having 4x M.2 NVMe drive sockets.  For a motherboard only supporting a single GPU there is no way the target customer will ever use all of those drive slots, and if they do well, then they bought the wrong motherboard.

Next Generation Design
Solid Performance
Supports 4x M.2 Drives
PCI Express 5.0
Excellent Industrial Design
Great Gaming Platform
You’ll Need a New Heatsink

Very little onboard RGB lighting
No benchtop controls
No driver disk
No real onboard audio
You’ll need a new CPU heatsink