Aorus Z370 Ultra Gaming Motherboard Review

Synthetic Benchmarks

3DMark Firestrike

The Gigabyte Aorus Ultra Gaming scored a little lower than expected in the stock testing. Of course, it’s not a bad score, and it’s still competitive, but we’re not expecting many people to run the i7-8700K at stock. While overclocked, things certainly caught up, and it set our fourth highest score. Of course, it’s virtually neck and neck with a few other motherboards too. Clearly, it’s letting our GTX 1080 Ti get on with its job.

Stock

Overclocked

Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme

Another strong score for the Ultra, showing a competitive score when it comes to GPU bound tasks, nothing crazy, but again it’s very competitive with everything else.

Stock

Overclocked

PCMark 10 Express

Again, nothing too crazy here in terms of performance, but still very competitive. The new 6-core 8700K is certainly a robust CPU and the Z370 CPUs are dominating the PCMark 10 Express benchmark. One thing I do like is that the Aorus scored 5845, but saw a boost up to 6282 once overclocked.

Stock

Overclocked

WPrime 32M and 1024M

The WPrime score could be better here, and it is the slowest time for the Z370 platform so far. Real world, not a huge problem, and I suspect another BIOS update will bring this in line with the other motherboards, as we know the CPU has more to offer. Of course, that’s at stock clocks, who runs an i7-8700K at stock? Once overclocked, it’s neck and neck with its competition and delivers a much tighter time of 101.289 seconds.

Stock

Overclocked

Cinebench R15

The new CPU is right at home in the Ultra Gaming, delivering a respectable score of 1418 at stock clocks and 1623 while overclocked. Not the fastest score for Z370, but in the real world it’s close enough that you wouldn’t notice the difference and we’re certainly happy with the performance so far.

Stock

Overclocked

Handbrake MP4 to MKV Conversion 4K

The 4K conversion worked great on the Ultra too, hitting just over 60 FPS while overclocked. If you’re transcoding a 4K movie, that’s a little over 2x real-time processing, which is superb for a consumer motherboard and CPU combo.

Stock

Overclocked