Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 7 Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 7: Packaging and Bundle3. Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 7: Board Layout and Features4. Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 7: UEFI5. Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 7: Software6. Testing Methodology7. Tests: CPU Related8. Tests: Memory Related9. Tests: Gaming Related10. Overclocking & Power Consumption11. Tests: Motherboard Features Performance12. Closing Thoughts13. View All Pages

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO disk benchmark is a Windows-based utility for testing storage performance of any storage drive or controller. We use the default benchmark setup.

M.2 PCIe Performance

For M.2 testing we use a Toshiba OCZ RD400 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD.

M.2 performance was as expected and cooling was decent enough. After three extended ATTO runs totalling close to 10 minutes temperatures hovered around the low 70s (degrees Celsius). This result was slightly worse than that of MSI's X299 Gaming M7 ACK but there's not a lot in it.

Admittedly, the use of an open air test bench for our benchmarking is probably favourable for the test results but we’ve seen almost every Z270 motherboard before this throttle under the same conditions.

USB Performance

We test USB 3.0 and 3.1 performance using a pair of Transcend SSD370S 512GB SSDs in RAID 0 connected to an Icy Box RD2253-U31 2-bay USB 3.1 enclosure powered by an ASMedia ASM1352R controller.

USB 3.0 performance met expectations but USB 3.1 was about 100 MB/s down where we'd expect it to be. Our only theory for this is that the rear USB 3.1 Type-A ports go over a Realtek Hub (RTS5423) rather than direct to an ASMedia ASM3142 controller, this clearly impacts performance. Not only is the peak throughput down but the results were a little bit more inconsistent too.

SATA 6Gbps Performance

For SATA 6Gbps testing we use an OCZ Trion 150 480GB SSD.

SATA performance brought no surprises.

Audio

Rightmark Audio Analyser is a freeware benchmarking utility designed to objectively test the performance characteristics of audio solutions. We setup a line-in line-out loop and execute the record/playback test before generating the results report you see below. A sampling mode of 24-bit, 192 kHz is tested where available. If unavailable the closest alternative operating mode available is used and clearly marked.

Strangely the Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 7 couldn't operate at 24bit, 192 KHz on the line-in despite having the same audio codec as the MSI motherboard. We had to test at 48KHz instead, meaning the results are not directly comparable.

The results returned are “Very Good” overall, just like the MSI X299 ACK Gaming M7, but MSI's solution achieved better numbers and ratings across the suite of audio tests.

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