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THE OVERCLOCKER | PRESENTS
THE OVERCLOCKER
PRESENTS
GIGABYTE Z490 AORUS PRO-AX
GIGABYTE
Z490 AORUS PRO-AX
Z490 is here, and with it Intel launched the 10th generation Core desktop CPUs. Whatever one’s opinion on the value proposition of these CPUs, one can’t deny just how well many of the motherboards for this platform turned out.
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he Z490 AOURS PRO-AX is one such example. Now let’s be clear, I’m not saying this motherboard is perfect, far from it. However, it does enough of the right things to negate several of the less than optimal decisions concerning the user experience. I guess the easiest and most obvious place, to begin with, is the motherboard layout and feature set. The specifications list for this board while impressive are par for the course in a motherboard at this price. Motherboards at this price point have come some ways and now offer more than what high-end alternatives from yesterday had as their exclusive domain.
Let’s take, for instance, the 2.5Gbps LAN courtesy of the Intel I225-V controller. It’s the next generation of the 1Gbps controller we had gotten used to for all these years. It wasn’t too long ago that only 3rd party controllers would offer this connection bit-rate, but now it’s on just about every mid-tier offering on the market including the AORUS PRO-AX. This has naturally meant that motherboards which previously relied on such connection speeds for product distinction have had to move up to 5Gbps or even 10Gbps solutions as we see on the Z490 AORUS Extreme. We see this feature permeation into more affordable SKUs throughout the PRO-AX. From the Bluetooth 5.1 support, to the three M.2 sockets, two of which have heat sinks. It is perhaps in the M.2 sockets then, where one finds an example of some less than optimal
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design decisions. The two sockets one can use feature a hefty heat sink. The uppermost socket, however, reserved for the inevitable Comet-lake CPU successor, has no such shielding. Given this socket would likely house a high-performance PCIe 4.0 x4 drive, a heat-sink here is not optional but necessary. These small but sub-optimal design choices are present in a select number of areas across the board. Looking at the usual array of shrouds, covers and the matching RGB LED lighting, one can see that the PRO-AX is rather light on these. Outside of the expected basic lighting, there isn’t much else to make this as visually distinct as other offerings in the lineup. I’d never say this board is unsightly or boring, but it doesn’t do enough visually to make it stand out from the large number of similar offerings from GIGABYTE and competitors. Still, the most important element for me is how well the motherboard goes, more than what it looks like, which is the most meaningful part of the entire board. Adding various controllers, fan headers and other value add functionality on a board largely depends on its target pricing. So a costlier model would naturally have more features. The genuine test for me is how well the motherboard performs, how well it overclocks, and how readily accessible these two aspects are. This is of even greater importance now with such stiff competition from the AMD platform. A platform which by default seems to offer more tuning options that are not dependent on the board but the inherent platform features.
No other motherboard manufacture has an ATX board at this price which can claim such high-frequency DRAM support... THE OVERCLOCKER PRESENTS GIGABYTE Z490 AORUS PRO-AX 3
GIGABYTE Z490 AORUS PRO-AX PRESENTS THE OVERCLOCKER 4
GIGABYTE boards have gone from being some of the poorest DRAM overclocking boards to effectively the best in this generation, at least on paper. 6,600MT/s DRAM frequency record withstanding, it’s the AORUS boards of this generation which claim the highest DRAM frequency support across the largest number of offerings. Even at this $270 price, the Z490 AORUS PRO-AX enjoys DDR4 5000 official support, with at least two DRAM kits validated for this frequency according to the QVL. No other motherboard manufacture has an ATX board at this price which can claim such high-frequency DRAM support. That on its own is worth celebrating and is by far the greatest argument I can make for this motherboard.
In my testing I may not have been able to reach 5,000MT/s, but that’s because of not having the right DRAM kit which would be capable of this feat on any platform. Fortunately, that didn’t prevent one from tuning the board and recording some outstanding performance figures for DDR4 4266. Perhaps not as impressive a frequency as one wished for but with enough tuning of the secondary, tertiary, and RTL/IOL timings. The PRO-AX produced some stellar results. outpacing other boards, I had huge expectations off by some distance. Now with that said, the question is how easy is it to access this performance and tuning capacity? Well, this is where small design changes or additions to the PRO-AX would have gone a long way. For one,
the absence of a POST code LED complicates matters for DRAM tuning. Certain codes during the memory training sequence can help shed some light on what’s preventing POST. This little addition is a massive time saver even without onboard power and reset buttons. This single omission makes accessing the DRAM overclocking and tuning abilities that much harder than they ought to be. In fact, in my testing it was easier to validate the settings on the Z490 AORUS MASTER, then copy those settings over to the PRO-AX. It would have easily taken twice as long to achieve the same result without the MASTER.
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The PRO-AX produced some stellar results. outpacing other boards...
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but I’ve never found is as useful as it is on the PRO-AX. Individual menu items, sub-menu, and settings one adds by pressing the ‘insert’ key. An asterisk appears next to that item and it’ll be accessible from your favorite’s menu. A small addition and change, but one that makes a noticeable difference for those who like to tinker and tweak the system.
GIGABYTE Z490 AORUS PRO-AX
Related to DRAM overclocking and performance tuning is the UEFI experience. Traditionally this has always been a major weakness for AORUS boards if not the biggest weakness. No matter how great the board was, it inevitably suffered from a weak user experience courtesy of the UEFI and windows software. Even with the switch to the current UEFI interface, but before its HD treatment, it was always tedious. The Z490 offerings have brought muchneeded improvements, and I’d say they no longer hold the title for the worst UX. Let’s examine the favorites menu, for example. It’s present on many competing boards,
These minor things matter as chipsets integrate much of the functionality, which previously depended on 3rd party controllers. The ability to distinguish the product from the rest will increasingly lean towards better software and user experiences, and Gigabyte is on the right path here. 5
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This extends to windows software. I’m not fond of the App Center as it literally offers nothing stand-alone applications cannot. That said, EasyTune is vastly improved over past iterations. It isn’t as comprehensive as it could be, but it’s easy enough to navigate, has a resizable window, and an intuitive interface. The Z490 AORUS boards offer a much improved user experience all around. Performance Tuning on Z490 AORUS PRO-AX I touched on this before, but it really is a marvel for me I could extract so much from the motherboard so readily. I’ve always found performance tuning on GIGABYTE boards to be unnecessarily challenging. Not because of a lack of tun-ing options, rather it was the odd naming and puzzling layout choices. For the longest time, setting load line calibration was a confusing affair. I could
never figure out the difference between Auto, Normal and Standard. Besides these, there was low, medium, high, turbo,
• Core i5 10600K • G.SKILL Trident Z 3200 C14 KIT (2x8GB) • Palit RTX 2080 Super Jet Stream • Official F3 BIOS
extreme and ultra-extreme. How this was ever a valid way of presenting options is beyond me. Gigabyte has kept this naming scheme, but in what seems an admission of how poorly communicated these options are, they have added an illustration. One which assigns these settings to a particular level of droop compensation. If this was a necessary addition, then why not get rid of the selection menu which creates
the ambiguity in the first place? Either way, that was not going to stop me from having fun with the tuning options presented. Getting the desired voltage out of this motherboard can prove difficult, as there’s no rhyme or reason to how much droop compensation any of the settings will apply against your chosen voltage. Direct keying of voltages can also change clock ratio settings for no apparent reason. Definitely teething issues, which by the time you read this will hopefully have a fix. Unlike with competing boards, Gigabyte doesn’t offer the retry or safe boot button on many of their boards. If the Pro-AX is to not have a POST code display, then a retry or better yet, a safe boot button would be unlikely. Recovering from aggressive tuning settings can be a challenge as the board can fail memory training near indefinitely, forcing you to clear the CMOS at every turn.
for unusually tight memory subtimings. The Z490 AORUSPRO-AX also deals with system agent and VCCIO voltages well. Yes, there is some overshoot for DDR 4,266 but I have seen worse. I could only manage a marginally lower voltage compare to the near 1.4v the auto rules applied. The ease with which one can tune this motherboard and its tolerance for questionable overclocking practices is rather alarming.
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Fortunately, the motherboard refining this process further. tolerates ridiculous memory It truly was a pleasant surprise settings. It would, even at the discovering just how tunable worst of times, make it to the this motherboard is. Some UEFI screen where if one is quick settings definitely stabilize the enough, one can apply changes system and make the entire to the offending setting before process less frustrating, despite the system locks up. This is missing any form of explanation. where the favorites menu comes The enhanced stability setting in, eliminating the time to get to literally allowed the CORSAIR SE the memory timings menu. memory I was using to operate comfortably at 4266MT/s. True Overall, I’m pleasantly to its name, stability increased surprised by these changes and would want Gigabyte to continue and so did the board’s tolerance
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I suppose we can observe such performance across the entire range of AORUS boards, but
my experiences were with the PRO-AX and I must attribute these numbers to this motherboard rather than all. The Z490 AORUS PRO-AX isn’t perfect by any means and could do with several obvious improvements. However, it’s so proficient at what it gets right, it’s difficult to not be fond of it as some level. Final Verdict If you’ve read this far, well done. If you want to know about the more general features and functions of this motherboard, see the web review. As a standalone experience and one that improved post F3 BIOS (I tested with F4 and F5c), the PRO-AX delivered. I came into the experience with low expectations given
the lacked of what I would consider basic. Spending more time with the motherboard instead of chasing a deadline however, allowed it to overcome those shortcomings in other ways. I’d not choose this motherboard for any competitive overclocking, but that has nothing to do with its capacity for it, but the on-board functionalities which make such adventures more workable. For that exercise, I’d go with the Ultra or the Master. For everything else, I’d choose the PRO-AX. It’s not supposed to be this capable, given all it lacks, but honestly it is genuinely good. One could much worse for the $270, but not much better, if at all.
GIGABYTE Z490 AORUS PRO-AX
Initially, I sought to undertake basic sub-zero overclocking, but the absence of the postcode display and other basic buttons made this laborious. Subsequently, I decide against it, choosing instead to extract as much performance out of the Core i5-10600K via other means. It is then, where the Z490 AORUS PRO-AX outperformed every other motherboard I put up against it. Part if not all of this due once again to the board’s tolerance for low sub-timings. Gigabyte doesn’t have a fancy word for its memory enhancement layout, but perhaps they should as whatever secret source they poured into this board, it works.
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