Gigabyte X399 Aorus Xtreme review: A crazy motherboard for a crazy processor

Note: This article was first published on 24th September 2018.

Same chipset, plenty of new features

AMD has taken great pride in its recent CPU releases, and with good reason. It’s first to market with a 32-core processor for consumers, and if you’re already running a first-generation Threadripper chip, you won’t even need to buy a new motherboard for the Threadripper 2990WX.

The company has put a lot of emphasis on fleshing out its ecosystem of motherboards, coolers, and other accessories, which is why it’s taken care to ensure backward compatibility with the existing X399 platform and SocketTR4.

You’ll be able to drop any Threadripper 2000-series chip into an existing X399 motherboard, which certainly saves you some money if you’re already on the platform.

That said, what’s a motherboard maker to do when there’s technically no need for any new boards? Do they stick to their existing line-up or do they release new models with even beefier specifications and more features?

As it turns out, Gigabyte has opted for the latter route with the X399 Aorus Xtreme, its new X399 flagship that’s been jam-packed with nearly every conceivable feature.

The X399 Aorus Xtreme is built like a tank. It is extremely heavy, no thanks to a metal backplate that spans the entire length and width of the board. That said, the extra structural support is reassuring and really helps prevent the flexing of the PCB, especially since this is an E-ATX board. According to Aorus, the backplate functions as more than just structural support and can act as a passive heatsink to lower the backside PWM component temperatures by up to 10 per cent.

Moving over to the front of the board, you’ll find massive VRM heatsinks encircling the CPU socket. This is clearly a board built for overclocking, where it’s important to keep the MOSFETs and other crucial components running cool. The MOSFETs can get pretty hot with high currents, which in turns affects the resistance of the semiconductor. This could lead to a drop in efficiency and precipitate a vicious cycle that leads to more heat.

The main heatsink is built from copper, which is more effective at dissipating heat than aluminum. It’s also not every day you see proper heatsink fins on a motherboard, so Gigabyte has really gone all out here.

The two heatsink fin arrays are linked to each other via a single heat pipe. This heat pipe is also in direct contact with the MOSFETs and helps transfer heat from them to the heatsink arrays. In addition, Gigabyte says it uses high thermal conductivity pads in the VRM region to further aid in heat transfer.

There’s built-in active cooling for the VRM components as well. The large I/O shroud houses two 30mm fans that blows at the MOSFET heatsinks. They’re pegged to VRM temperatures as reported by an onboard thermal sensor and can stop spinning entirely during low loads.

Speaking of overclocking, the board also features a 10+3-phase power design and Infineon IR3578 rectifiers. It’s sporting digital PWM controllers and PowlRStage MOSFETs as well,  which can handle up to 50A of current on each phase. Gigabyte also equipped the board with two 8-pin connectors for the CPU, and you should make sure to connect the both of them.

Cooling for the storage devices hasn’t been neglected either. The X399 Aorus Xtreme will take up to three M.2 drives, including two 22110 slots and one 2280. Each of these has their own heatsink, and the design is such that it blends in really well with the rest of the board.

The number of SATA ports has been decreased from eight to six, which is an acknowledgment of the growing popularity of M.2 drives.

There are a total of four full-length PCIe 3.0 slots, two of which can run at full x16 speeds. The other two are limited to x8/x8 mode, and there’s also a fifth PCIe 2.0 x1 slot. 48 PCIe 3.0 lanes have been reserved for the graphics cards, so you’ll be able to run 4-way SLI or CrossFire with no problems in an x8/x16/x8/x16 configuration.

If you want still more power to overclock your cards, there’s an additional 6-pin PCIe power connector next to the SATA ports. On the topic of power connectors, Gigabyte says it’s using what it refers to as solid pin power connectors on this board, which supposedly offer a larger contact area for electricity, a longer lifespan, and a better ability to sustain higher power and heat.

The rear I/O panel houses plenty of USB connectors, a power/reset button, and a button for clearing CMOS. There’s also an integrated I/O shield, which helps simplify the installation process somewhat.

In total, the board has one USB 3.1 (Gen 2) Type-C, one USB 3.1 (Gen 2) Type-A, eight USB 3.1 (Gen 1) Type-A, and no fewer than three RJ-45 ports. The latter comprises dual Intel Gigabit Ethernet ports and one 10 Gigabit connector provided by an Aquantia GbE LAN chip. On top of that, there’s support for 802.11ac dual-band Wi-Fi (maximum throughput up to 867Mbps) and Bluetooth 4.2.

Is this too much? Probably, but that’s what this board is all about. You’ll need a 10 Gigabit plan from your ISP to even begin to take advantage of the Aquantia port, but it’s there if you ever need it.

In addition, the board also comes with a debug display at the bottom right, and dual onboard BIOS for easier recovery from failed overclocks.

If I had one gripe though, it would be how close the RAM slots are located to the CPU socket. Having worked with both the ASUS ROG Zenith Extreme and the Aorus board, it’s obvious that ASUS has left more space between the socket and the RAM slots.

I don’t see this as a big problem, especially since most folks will probably use a closed loop cooler or a custom liquid cooling solution. However, it could possibly present some hiccups with large air coolers and high-profile RAM sticks, so it’s just something you should be aware of.

Gigabyte does score a point against the ASUS board though. I had a notoriously difficult time trying to get the torque screws holding the CPU plate on the ROG Zenith Extreme to catch, to the point that I had to push down on the board with my entire body weight for there to be any hope of the screws threading. On the other hand, it seems like Gigabyte has made its screws slightly longer, or at least it's doing something right, because I had no problems in this area at all.

Finally, what’s really striking about the board is how subdued it is compared to some of Gigabyte’s other premium offerings. There are plenty of RGB LEDs and LED strip headers to be sure, but they aren’t glaring at you from every corner of the board. Instead, the lighting is mostly limited to an underglow on the board’s right edge and the I/O shroud and PCH heatsinks. I find this a lot more appealing than having the PCIe and RAM slots light up as well, and I sure hope Gigabyte chooses to implement this approach on more of its boards.

Test Setup

Here's the configuration of our test bench:

• AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX (3.0GHz, 64MB L3 cache)
• Enermax Liqtech TR4 240
• Gigabyte X399 Aorus Xtreme
• 4 x 4GB G.Skill Flare X DDR4-3200 (Auto timings: CAS 14-14-14-34)
• ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
• Samsung 850 Pro 250GB SSD
• Windows 10 Home (64-bit)

The list of benchmarks used is as follows:

• SYSmark 2018
• SPECviewperf 13
• Cinebench R15
• 3DMark
• Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation
• Far Cry 5

We'll be comparing the board against the ASUS ROG Zenith Extreme, another high-end X399 motherboard.

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Performance benchmarks

SYSmark 2018

SYSmark is a general productivity benchmark suite that measures the response times of tasks on a PC using real-world applications like Microsoft Office 2016 and Adobe Photoshop CC and simulated user input. Task response times are used to generate a performance rating that reflects actual user experience, so the faster a PC responds to application workloads, the higher its score will be. The method of measuring response times can take many forms, such as the time it takes for an application to show a pop-up completion message, or how long it takes a progress dialog to disappear and for a user to regain application control.

SYSmark 2018 measures performance in the areas of Productivity, Creativity, and Responsiveness, featuring new, updated applications that better reflect modern usage scenarios.

Unsurprisingly, the two boards performed very closely to each other and there isn't that significant a difference in overall scores. 

SPECviewperf 13

SPECviewperf is used to assess the 3D graphics performance of systems in professional applications. Each individual workload, called a viewset, represents graphics and content from an actual real-world application. SPECviewperf actually runs a total of eight different viewsets, but we’ve picked the four which have the greatest performance variation across CPUs display here.

The new SPECviewperf 13 incorporates new models and raycasting for volume visualization. The Maya viewset has also been updated with new models based on the SPECapc for Maya 2017 benchmark. All other viewsets have also been recompiled with minor changes.

The two boards were once again neck-and-neck, and it's impossible to really tease out a winner. 

Cinebench R15

Cinebench is a benchmark tool used to compare CPU performance across different systems, so we’ll be using it to evaluate how well the Threadripper 2990WX plays with the different motherboards. The multi-threaded test scenario uses all of the system’s processing power – it can utilize up to 256 threads – to render a photorealistic 3D scene, making use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores. Conversely, the single-core test stresses just one core.

The ASUS board had a small 3 per cent lead in Cinebench, but once again, I'd say that that's a minuscule difference. 

3DMark

3DMark is a synthetic gaming benchmark that tests graphics and computational performance at different resolutions, starting at 1080p and going all the way up to 4K. A series of two graphics test, one physics test, and then a combined test stresses your hardware in turn to assess its performance.

We’ve also teased out the Physics and CPU scores for the Fire Strike and Time Spy tests and compiled them in separate tables to give a better idea of CPU performance on each board.

The two boards traded blows here, and it's difficult to give a clear lead to either one.

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation

Ashes of the Singularity is one of the few CPU-bound games out there, if you’re playing on lower resolutions and settings that is.

Performance was super close in Escalation, and both boards turned out very similar performances.

Far Cry 5

Far Cry 5 is heavily CPU-limiting, and the Threadripper 2990WX is clearly holding performance back in this case.

Temperature, power consumption and overclocking

Temperature

We measured the temperatures of the VRM and PCH heatsinks after running 40 loops of the 3DMark Fire Strike Stress Test. You’ll naturally want lower temperatures since it shows that the respective heatsinks are doing a more effective job of dissipating heat.

Power consumption

To test power, we ran the energy-02 viewset in SPECviewperf 13 and recorded the peak power consumption. Idle power consumption was recorded after the system had idled at desktop for a while.

The Aorus board recorded a marginally higher system power draw, but it's again not a difference I'd lose sleep over.

Overclocking

The table below shows the clock speeds we achieved, along with the CPU vCore, multiplier, and RAM frequencies. We've also included the respective BIOS versions of the boards for those who are keen to know such details.

The Aorus board produced slightly better numbers after overclocking, but the ASUS model offered a better BIOS interface and layout. Most of the key settings, such as voltage settings, are located on the same menu page, so you don’t have to toggle between different pages as on the Aorus motherboard.

In addition, the ROG Zenith Extreme offered a relatively hassle-free experience as the system booted up and ran Cinebench with no problems after simply changing the CPU core ratio and leaving everything else on Auto. The board seemed content to adjust the voltages accordingly without much need for manual adjustments on my end.

On the other hand, the X399 Aorus Xtreme required me to set LLC to High and adjust the CPU Vcore manually. That said, it's not a super big deal, and most people who are even looking at this section of the BIOS will probably be comfortable with making manual tweaks anyway.

Armed to the teeth

The X399 Aorus Xtreme takes things up a notch over last year's Gaming 7, and it's by and large succeeded in creating a better board that's a super attractive home for your Threadripper chip.

It looks good, performs well, and has just about every feature you'd need. Sure, I'd like to have seen a faster Wi-Fi chip and maybe RAM slots that are located further away from the CPU socket, but neither of these things are deal breakers. 

At S$635, the X399 Aorus Xtreme is a lot cheaper than the S$969 ASUS ROG Zenith Extreme, while still offering a similar level of performance and feature set. The ROG Zenith Extreme is still the more feature-rich board, with support for VRM cooling add-ons and luxuries like 802.11ad WiGig and an OLED status display on the I/O shield, but these aren't really essential features.

The ASUS board also has support for 10 Gigabit Ethernet, but it does so through the ROG Areion PCIe add-on card. In comparison, the X399 Aorus Extreme offers 10 Gigabit support without any need for extra hardware, arguably a more elegant solution.

If you don't need the extra bells and whistles the ROG Zenith Extreme offers, the X399 Aorus Xtreme is shaping up to be an excellent choice for your Threadripper build.

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