How Much Does It Cost?
The Gigabyte X670E AORUS XTREME AM5 PCIe 5.0 DDR5 ATX Motherboard is available now from Scan for just £699.99. I say “just” because honestly, in the last few years we’ve seen flagship motherboards virtually the same as this for Intel platforms with £1000 price tags, and frankly, this seems like a bit of a bargain all things considered. If you’re building a time-critical high-end rendering and workstation, you’re going to make your time back with more performance and less operating time.
Overview
This motherboard is complete overkill and you do not need it. Something half the price is going to blow you away for work and gaming, most likely. But… well, it is extremely fast. When it comes to gaming performance the competition gets close, but this is the fastest. When it comes to cooling, the competition gets close, but this is cooler. When it comes to connectivity, the competition gets close, but this goes a little bit further. I think you get the general idea, you pay a lot, but you get the best, it’s as simple as that.
If I was building a completely balls-to-the-wall extreme gaming PC with an AMD CPU, then yeah, absolutely this is the motherboard to get, even if in reality it’s not really built to be a gaming motherboard, at least… I don’t think it is.
Gamers do not need or use 10Gbe LAN or USB4 and Type-C, and honestly, they are extremely expensive additions to this motherboard and I fully suggest you do not buy this motherboard unless you have real-world uses for them as you could save hundreds of pounds. However, if you have a fast RAID array DAS or NAS on your network, and use external SSD drives for big file transfers, it’s going to be very advantageous; videographers, editors, and developers will no doubt be the main target.
The big VRMs are hardly getting taxed when it comes to gaming either, where a CPU may hit a boost clock here and there as the game needs it, but that’s just a walk in the park for this motherboard. It’s built for heavy rendering and calculation tasks where the CPU is sitting at 100% all, day, long. If you’re rendering 4K video or building a 3D scene, you don’t want your CPU throttling, you don’t want your VRMs getting hot, and you don’t want your M.2 drives slowing down. The X670E AORUS XTREME will ensure all your hardware is working at its best for longer, it’s as simple as that.
Should I Buy One?
Probably not, it’s complete overkill and ruinously expensive, but if you really need all the features it offers and plan to thrash your hardware relentlessly, it’s an investment you’re unlikely to regret. Truly one of the best motherboards we’ve ever seen in terms of performance and features.
