Yesterday at Computex, Gigabyte announced five new X570 AORUS motherboards and a brand new PCIe 4.0 Gen 4 SSD with blistering fast speeds. Now, Leo has had a chance to roam the booth to get a closer look, we've also discovered a few new bits that we didn't know about before, including refreshed X299 motherboards, a brand new Aero 15 laptop with 4K OLED and an ultra high-end WS board for Intel's 28-core Xeon.
We gave an overview of the X570 lineup yesterday, with the AORUS XTREME sitting at the very top of the pile. This particular board has an 8-layer PCB, which has also paved the way for all connectors to be mounted on the side of the board, making cable management a breeze. It is likely going to be very expensive though, an exact price has yet to be confirmed but we are guessing somewhere in the $500 to $600 range. The AORUS Master is one step down and uses a 6-layer PCB instead, which means traditional top-mounted connectors. Other than that, the spec is similar to the XTREME, with the main differences being 14-phase power instead of 16-phase and the omission of Aquantia 10G LAN.
The X570 AORUS Ultra and X570 AORUS Pro are also quite similar, although the Ultra comes with the benefit of Intel WiFi 6 technology and an extra PCIe Gen 4 x4 lane, while the Pro is limited to PCIe 4 x16 and x8. The X570 AORUS Elite is likely going to be the cheapest of the bunch, with fewer RGB LEDs and PCIe 4 x16 being the only option. For Mini-ITX fans, the X570-I AORUS Pro WiFi fits as many high-end features onto the board as possible. That includes an 8-layer PCB, PCIe 4 x16 and Intel WiFi 6. As Leo says in the video, this is very much an enthusiast-grade Mini-ITX board, so it won't come cheap but exact pricing has yet to be confirmed.
The X299 refresh is only briefly touched upon but if you are deciding to make the jump to Intel's HEDT platform, you can expect a few newer, spruced up motherboards. This will include the X299G AORUS Master, which upgrades to Intel WiFi 6, upgrades on-board audio and a tweaked thermal design. The X299G AORUS XTREME Waterforce is also on the way, which comes with many of the same features but also includes a motherboard waterblock.
We've heard about the C621 AORUS XTREME in the past. This is going to be Gigabyte's most expensive consumer board and is comparable to the ROG Dominus, which we first saw at CES in January. This one supports the Intel W-3175X 28-core Xeon processor and is packed to the brim with high-end features, including seven PCIe slots, 12 ECC memory dimm slots, 32-phase Digital VRM power management and more. We were unsure if this board would see the light of day but so far, it is looking good.
Gigabyte AORUS SSDs have been around for a while now and are often very high-end with very good speeds. The advent of PCIe 4 on X570 means that things can be pushed even further, paving the way for the AORUS Gen 4 M.2 SSD, which similarly to the Corsair MP600, leverages the extra bandwidth of PCIe 4 to deliver blistering fast speeds. In this case, you can expect sequential read speeds of up to 5000MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 4400MB/s.
Last but not least, we arrive at Gigabyte's latest laptop. The Aero 15 has been around for a while but the latest version is the best yet. It comes with either a 9th Gen Intel Core i9 or Core i7 H-series processor inside and NVIDIA RTX 20 series or GTX 16 series graphics depending on budget. However, the display is really the shining star here, with the panel being a 4K OLED from Samsung, which looks incredible. As a side note, this is also one of the first ‘All Intel Inside' laptops, which is a new initiative aimed at getting Intel CPUs, SSDs, Optane and networking technology all paired together in one machine.
KitGuru Says: There's a lot of good stuff to see at Gigabyte today, from motherboards to SSDs and laptops. Did anything in particular catch your eye?