When Gigabyte unveiled the X399 Aorus Xtreme motherboard we could see they were taking AMD 2nd Gen. Threadripper seriously. The new Threadripper WX models increased TDP from 180W to 250W so while it would be quite possible to install a 32-core 2990WX in a motherboard such as Gigabyte X399 Aorus Gaming 7 you wouldn’t be surprised if it struggled to supply the CPU with enough power. Gigabyte was clearly thinking along the same lines and has updated the VRMs from the 8+2 configuration used in the Gaming 7 to a 10+3 arrangement in the Xtreme. In addition to this hardware Gigabyte has put a significant emphasis on keeping the components nice and cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vQQh5WjJR4 Gigabyte has included a total of three Ethernet ports, which consists of two Intel Gigabit and one Aquantia 10 Gigabit. To our mind 10Gbit is an expensive luxury for gamers however a number of our YouTube audience are absolutely in love with this feature. Nonetheless, we maintain that gamers will be perfectly well served by Gigabit while it is workstation users who will benefit from 10Gbit. The obvious conundrum here is that X399 Aorus Xtreme is, apparently, a gamer’s motherboard while the 32-core Threadripper 2990WX CPU is clearly aimed at the professional market. The way we see it is that the X399 Aorus Xtreme does indeed carry the Aorus gaming brand name however it seems to have more in common with a Designare workstation motherboard that has been garnished with some RGB lighting. Key features Supports AMD 1st and 2nd Generation Ryzen Threadripper Processors Quad Channel ECC/Non-ECC Unbuffered DDR4, 8 DIMMs, Up to 3600MHz+(OC)/ 3466MHz+(OC) Server-Class 10+3 IR3578 Digital Power PWM Design Cutting-edge Thermal Design with Fins-Array Heatsink and Direct Touch Heat pipe Ultra Durable Solid Pin Power Connectors 4-Way Graphics Support with Dual Armour and Ultra Durable Design Dual Intel 1210 GbE LAN with cFosSpeed Internet Accelerator + Aquantia AQC107 10GbE BASE-T LAN Triple Ultra-Fast NVMe PCIe Gen3 x4 M.2 with Triple Thermal Guard ALC1220-VB Enhance 114dB(Rear)/110dB (Front) SNR in Microphone with ESS 9118 Sabre Hi-Fi DAC Intel Dual Band 802.11ac WiFi + Bluetooth 4.2 NanoCarbon Base Plate and I/O Shield Armour Smart Fan 5 Features Multiple Temperature Sensors and Hybrid Fan Headers with Fan Stop RGB Fusion with Multi-Zone Digital LED Light Show Design, Supports Addressable LED and RGB LED Strips. Note: if the above images are not displaying properly, you may need to disable Ad Block as it is known to interfere with our display code When you remove the Gigabyte X399 Aorus Xtreme from the package it looks impressive clad in the various heat sinks, I/O shield, M.2 covers and the extensive back plate. Each of these parts has an obvious cosmetic aspect as well as helping to keep the board cool. The backplate is described as a ’NanoCarbon Base Plate’ and helps to remove heat from the components on the backside of the motherboard, the M.2 covers have an obvious function and the heat sinks on the VRMs are proper finned items that are linked by a heat pipe. The plastic shroud over the VRM heat sinks looks a bit gaudy and seems to be a prime candidate for removal to expose the VRM heat sinks. In fact, when you strip off these components you will see the I/O shroud contains a pair of 30mm fans that move the air around in the area of the I/O panel and in particular across the tiny heatsink on the 10Gbit Aquantia chip. It is not entirely clear where the air is meant to flow to as the I/O panel presents a solid obstacle without any obvious exhaust holes. The I/O shield or ‘Integrated I/O Shield Armour’ is fixed in place so this is clearly how Gigabyte has things planned. Clearly those three Ethernet ports take up a fair amount of the I/O panel, and naturally you get integrated audio which has to be accommodated. Added to that Gigabyte has packed in ten USB ports, so most of the space has been sensibly used. The integrated 802.11ac Wi-Fi could be moved to an add-in PCI Express card, and that would free up some space, however the prime candidates for removal are the Power and Clear CMOS micro buttons. These have some value when you are benchmarking a motherboard on an open test bench as they are easy to access. On the other hand, once your PC is built and the system is under your desk the buttons are right at the back and pretty much useless. Worst of all, you might reach blindly round the back of your PC to connect a USB device and accidentally press a button. We fail to see why Gigabyte did not simply find a bit of space on the board for those two buttons, especially when you consider the form factor is E-ATX so the board is 269mm wide rather than 244mm for ATX. While we are confident that Gigabyte could find room for two buttons, it is worth pointing out the Xtreme does not have much space to spare. The CPU sockets, eight DDR4 slots and the VRM system take up the top half of the board while the PCI Express slots, M.2 slots and chipset cover pretty much fill the lower half. The other thing that is notable about the stripped down X399 Aorus Xtreme is that it bears a strong resemblance to the X399 Aorus Gaming 7, only bigger and more beefy. The Gaming 7 sports 8+2 x50A power stages while the Xtreme uses a 10+3 configuration of the same hardware. That is an IR35201 controller with IR3578 Driver/FET Digital PWMs and the extra two Vcore stages adds a maximum 100A power delivery. If we work with a CPU Vcore of 1.35V, the Gaming 7 can deliver a maximum 540W to the CPU while the Xtreme can manage 675W. You cannot load VRMs at 100 percent (they will shut down) and need to leave a safety margin so if we take a loaded figure of 70 percent we arrive at practical CPU power figures of 380W for the Gaming 7 and 470W for the Xtreme. As you will see in our testing those figures are significant as the new 32-core 2990WX draws 450W when it is working hard, which means that Gigabyte has designed the X399 Aorus Xtreme to be ready for anything you might throw in its direction. We spent the majority of our video talking about power delivery, support for the 32-core 2990WX, performance at high clock speeds and how this affects the cooling for the CPU and VRMs, which left little time to discuss the features of the Xtreme. We are happy to report the Xtreme is packed with a list of features that use the I/O of Threadripper including four graphics slots. Gigabyte points out that you can employ a massive amount of M.2 NVMe RAID however that requires add-in M.2 cards and is a feature provided by AMD rather than Gigabyte. You get a decent amount of USB 3.1 Gen.2 (Types A and C) on the I/O panel, as well as mid-board headers to connect to your case. Gigabyte has included Smart Fan 5 control for the seven PWM headers as well as RGB Fusion lighting to add a bit of bling. Testing Testing this mighty motherboard required a mighty CPU and the natural choice was the 32-core 2990WX. It seemed fairly pointless to look at low thread count performance as the idea of pushing two or four cores to high speeds means you are effectively ignoring 28 or 30 cores. We instead concentrated on all-core performance and that threw up an intriguing point as the 180W 2920X and 2950X models have a base speed of 3.5GHz while the 2990WX and 2970WX have a base speed that is a mere 3.0GHz. We expected to see the 2990WX CPU Boost beyond that speed but as we demonstrate in our video, when you use Auto settings the initial boost was only to 3.15GHz that dropped back to 3.05GHz. Essentially the 2990WX wouldn’t Boost beyond the base speed unless we gave it a helping hand, however that wasn’t exactly the same thing as overclocking to a fixed speed. As you will have seen in our video. That specific point became the focus of our testing. Test system CPU: AMD Threadripper 2990WX RAM: 32GB G.Skill FlareX DDR4-3200MHz Graphics: EVGA GTX 1080Ti SC 11GB GDDR5 SSD: 1TB WD Black M.2 NVMe Power Supply: Seasonic Prime Platinum 1300W CPU Cooler Custom loop components: CPU Block: Watercool Heatkiller IV Pump/Reservoir: EKWB XRES 140 Revo D5 PWM set to 2,200rpm Radiator: Alphacool NexXxos XT45 240mm Fans: 3x BlackNoise eLoop B12-1 800rpm set to Full Speed Fittings: Alphacool 10/16mm Tubing: Mayhems Ultra Clear 10/16mm Coolant: Mayhems Pastel Purple Thermal Compound: Arctic MX-4 Performance and Overclocking Performance and Overclocking Overview At stock clock speeds with the CPU power limit set at 250W you will struggle to separate the Gigabyte X399 Aorus Xtreme from any other X399 motherboard on the market. The 2990WX CPU will happily run around 3.1GHz all day long without any excitement and will handle video editing and other tasks with aplomb. We have to emphasise that 2990WX is a powerhouse of a CPU with a massive number of cores and low clock speeds that is well suited to Cinebench or Blender, however it cannot compete with Ryzen 7 or Intel Core i7 in the gaming sphere. Throughout this review we are comparing X399 Aorus Xtreme with Asus ROG Zenith Extreme and Gigabyte X399 Aorus Gaming 7, however we have included a 3D Mark Fire Strike graph with a Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Ultra Gaming/Core i7-8700K and ASRock X470 Taichi/Ryzen 7 2700X combos to illustrate the point. This has been covered on a number of occasions but the TLDR version is that most software cannot take advantage of a CPU with a massive number of cores. Added to that Threadripper WX has a relatively low clock speed and only two of the four cores have access to the DDR4 system RAM, so performance can be both unpredictable and slightly disappointing. On the other hand, if you use highly threaded software and can persuade the CPU to run at a higher clock speed you can achieve results that are quite astonishing. That’s an awful lot of ‘on-the-hand-but-on-the other hand’ shilly shallying but it boils down to the point we made over and again in our video about power limits. Use the BIOS to raise the power limit to 350W and you will see the CPU magically Boost to 3.5GHz on all cores and deliver a welcome increase of an extra ten percent CPU performance. This is the point where you can see a dividing line between X399 Aorus Xtreme and earlier X399 boards such as Gigabyte X399 Aorus Gaming 7 and Asus ROG Zenith Extreme which do not have the same ability to deliver power as the Xtreme. Overclocking the X399 Aorus Xtreme to 4.0GHz on all cores was very straightforward as we simply set core voltage to 1.35V and raised the multiplier to 40x. There is a good chance we could have achieved stability at a lower core voltage however the situation seemed perfectly satisfactory so we left the settings alone. Overclocking the Gigabyte X399 Aorus Gaming 7 was a much more difficult proposition and we found that any changes to Vcore and Load Line Calibration were likely to throw up a blue screen. We found the only way we could work with the board was to leave voltage settings on Auto and simply adjust the multiplier (with XMP enabled). This approach allowed us to run at 3.5GHz on all cores. By contrast the Asus ROG Zenith Extreme was happy to overclock however the power and heat levels were unhealthy with a core voltage of 1.35V so we pulled the settings back to 1.30V and found this gave a stable clock speed of 3.8GHz on all cores. You can predict the shape of our performance graphs from those figures as higher clock speeds directly lead to higher performance. What is less obvious is that manual overclocking on 2nd Gen. Threadripper looks like a bad idea, in exactly the same way we consider it a bad idea with 2nd. Gen. Ryzen. We demonstrated with Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 5 2600X (and to a certain extent with the Raven Ridge APUs) that AMD has worked wonders with Precision Boost 2 and XFR2, such that the CPU will dynamically adjust its clock speed under load, provided it has sufficient cooling and power. This is more effective than manually overclocking on all cores as the CPU is able to run a handful of threads at higher speed when required, then as the number of cores under load increases the clock speed gracefully declines. In the case of the X399 Aorus Xtreme we were able to overclock to 4.0GHz without difficulty however our preference would have been to leave the board on Auto settings with an increased power limit. This was precisely what Gigabyte delivered when they sent us the Pre-Beta BIOS Tx1. Provided it was made clear to the end user that the power limit had been raised, we would consider this the ideal set-up. Cooling Performance. CPU cooling was quite straightforward with the custom loop set-up on our test bench. It was notable the CPU ran around ten degrees cooler in Blender than it did in AIDA64, which gives a good indication how each workload stresses the CPU. We knew full well that higher core voltage and clock speed would result in higher CPU temperatures, and our chart reflects that point. We were more interested in seeing how each motherboard responded in terms of VRM temperatures as the workloads were truly epic. We were not disappointed; when it comes to VRMs the dividing line between one motherboard and another is huge. CPU Cooling Performance Overview. It is a statement of the obvious to say that lower CPU clock speeds generally give you lower CPU temperatures, however we found an exception to that rule. We started nice and easily with the Gigabyte X399 Aorus Gaming 7 that was running at a fixed 3.5GHz on low voltage and then to the Xtreme that was Boosting to 3.5GHz on all cores and delivering more performance than the Gaming 7. After that we come to the Asus ROG Zenith which looked relatively hot and bothered at a lowly 3.2GHz and at the top of the chart we have the Xtreme at a manual overclock of 4.0GHz. The Blender CPU temperature is just about OK at 81 degrees while AIDA64 is absolutely pushing the limits at 89 degrees. Asus ROG Zenith was on course to deliver the same temperatures at 3.8GHz however the VRMs were not up to the task in AIDA64 and the board shut down before we got a final result. VRM Cooling Performance Overview. Our chart for VRM temperatures is ordered by the figure we saw in Blender, rather than AIDA64. The two Gigabyte boards operated at identical VRM temperatures in both tests, however the Asus ROG Zenith Extreme behaved quite differently. With all cores Boosting to 3.2GHz the VRM temperatures in AIDA64 were 25 degrees higher than in Blender. With the CPU overclocked to 3.8GHz we saw the VRMs pushed very close to their limits in Blender and in AIDA64 the board did indeed pass the 125 degree limit and the thermal protection shut the board down. Power Draw We monitor CPU power draw using Powenetics project software from Cybenetics which means we are able to monitor both the overall system power and also the power that is feeding directly to the CPU cores. As you will see these numbers show significant differences between one Threadripper motherboard and another. Power Draw Overview The Gigabyte X399 Aorus Gaming 7 demonstrates that Auto voltage settings at 3.5GHz draw relatively little power. Glance back at the previous charts and you will see this board had low temperatures and low performance, so this behaviour is entirely consistent. Asus ROG Zenith Extreme drew more power at 3.2GHz than the Gaming 7 did at 3.5GHz, but there was nothing special to report. On the other hand when the Asus was pushed to 3.8GHz the power figures climbed significantly with figures that were almost identical to the Gigabyte Xtreme at 4.0GHz. The point here is that the VRMs on the Xtreme operated at temperatures about 25 degrees cooler than the Asus, which demonstrates the benefit of the ten phase VRMs used by Gigabyte, along with the superior cooling system. When you push a 32-core Threadripper to the limits the power draw is significant and as the clock speed climbs towards 4.0GHz the CPU cores require 450W, while the overall system power draw will be around 800W. Closing Thoughts. The Gigabyte X399 Aorus Xtreme is an impressive Threadripper motherboard that is a bigger, better version of the older Gaming 7. The board is dominated by the new 10-phase VRM design and it is controlled by the usual IR35201 chip however the IR3578 Driver/FET Digital PWMs do a decent job of powering the 32-core 2990WX. Nonetheless, when we pushed the CPU to 4.0GHz on all cores it was clear the Gigabyte Xtreme was at the limits of its performance. We strongly recommend you resist the temptation to manually overclock your CPU and instead let the AMD algorithms do the job for you. Gamers may consider that advice sounds ominous, however we take the opposite view. While this motherboard bears the Aorus name we do not consider it to be particularly suitable for gamers. Yes, it has RGB lighting, but it also has an E-ATX form factor, triple M.2 slots and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Actually that sells the Xtreme short as it also has dual Intel Gigabit Ethernet and also 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and when you takes those features together you have a motherboard that is best suited for a workstation. Anyone who chooses to match the Gigabyte X399 Aorus Xtreme with a Threadripper 2990WX will find they have a powerhouse of a workstation that has plenty of scope for expansion. Loads of PCI Express slots, plenty of SATA connectors and a bunch of M.2 slots to top off the selection. On the I/O panel you will find as many USB ports as any reasonable person could hope to see, as well as those bloomin’ micro buttons that we so dislike. There is very little to dislike about the Gigabyte X399 Aorus Xtreme and a great deal to admire however we have subsequently reviewed the MSI MEG X399 Creation which is a superb piece of hardware and that presents us with the problem of choosing between these two new X399 motherboards. Perhaps the easiest way is to ask yourself how hard you will push the clock speed on your Threadripper. If the answer is ‘very hard’ you should probably choose the MSI but if the charts in this review look good to you we are confident you will be happy with the Gigabyte. The other dividing line is the 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Real hardcore workstation people regard the Aquantia connection as a genuine bonus that saves them a fair amount of money. If fast Ethernet is your thing you should buy the Gigabyte X399 Aorus Xtreme without delay. Pros: 10-phase VRMs support the latest Threadripper CPUs. VRM coolers do a decent job. 10 Gigabit Aquantia Ethernet is included. Unlocking the power limit let our Threadripper 2990WX Boost to 3.5GHz. Loads of USB on the I/O panel. Cons: The price puts the Gigabyte X399 Xtreme head-to-head with MSI MEG X399 Creation. Power and Clear CMOS buttons are located on the I/O panel. E-ATX form factor will not suit some cases. Airflow under the I/O shield seems haphazard. Read more about the board over HERE Buy the motherboard from Overclockers UK Priced £449.99 inc VAT HERE KitGuru says: Gigabyte X399 Aorus Xtreme delivers ten phases of VRMs that can successfully power Threadripper 2990WX.