Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Master – Best VRM Cooling We Have Ever Seen

1. Introduction to Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Master2. Specification and hardware close-ups3. Testing:CPU4. Testing: Graphics and Games5. Performance and Overclocking6. Temperatures, Cooling and Power7. Closing Thoughts8. View All Pages

Testing and Performance Overview
During our testing the Z390 Aorus Master delivered solid performance however we noted a quirk in the clock speed of our Core i9-9900K CPU as the base clock was 102.03MHz, rather than the default 100MHz. At first we put this down to Gigabyte sneaking a couple of extra percentage points on performance, however the reality was more nuanced.

Some experimentation proved it was actually a question of XMP settings. With DDR4-3,200MHz RAM the base clock remained at 100MHz regardless of whether or not we enabled XMP. By contrast with DDR4-3,400MHz RAM the base clock rises to 102.03MHz when XMP is enabled. If we divide 3,400MHz by 102.03 we get 3,333MHz so it follows that 3,333MHz is a ‘natural’ speed for RAM in the BIOS and that selecting 3,400MHz requires a slightly higher base clock to get the RAM to operate at full speed.

We do not consider this to be a problem but would have preferred it if Gigabyte had spelled out more clearly what was going on when XMP was enabled.

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