Aorus mobo niggles.

[philehidiot]

Eh up,

I've always used Asus mobos and this must be my first Gigabyte one. I think the Asus niggles I was just so used to I didn't notice them but there are a few things on the Gigabyte one I didn't expect / didn't research properly. Just hoping people can learn from my experience.

I've got one and I'm setting things up finally after being told to hide away for a few months. There are a couple of warnings I'd like to give about this X570 mobo as it's well priced and I'd expect that it will form the basis of a few systems.

1) SATA support is bad. The QVL for SATA drives is short and I've got problems with two of four SATA drives. One is now totally out of use as the system takes a month to POST with it connected (Intel X-25M) and the Crucial M500 is also being very sketchy. OCZ Vertex drive is working fine but this is a very small drive and so I'm down over 500GB of fast storage unless I can find a fix somewhere in the BIOS or if there's a BIOS update that fixes it. The bigger problem for me is my back up system relied extensively on these drives. I had to get one working and dump the vital stuff onto the currently working drives. Thinking I might find a caddy and make them USB drives.

2) The App Centre updates. Check these manually as it says it's only going to update what you select and then tries to put Norton, Chrome, Google Drive and the Google Toolbar on when you see what's actually downloading. This made me VERY CROSS. I despise Norton with a passion and one of the reasons I build my own is to avoid bloatware.

3) Fan profiles are terrible for high end Ryzen + AIO and will need significant time to revise. You may be best with a good air cooler which is what I would have done had I not already had an AIO from my old system. This cooling system never used to get loud at all with an Intel chip except under 4K gaming. Now it's making a racket ALL the time and going up and down relentlessly so you can't even block it out. You'll need a fair bit of time to sort this out unless you can find a ready baked profile that works for your set up. I did a stress test and the temperature peaked at only 69C so I don't think it's my cooling set up.

4) RGB headers are numerous, fan headers are not. You'll need splitters or a seperate fan controller if you have many fans. I looked at the board pictures and didn't read that most of the headers were RGB, thinking my cooling system would be fine. It is not and I DON'T WANT A GLOWING PC!

5) Onboard sound. I had to ditch my X-Fi Elite Pro as it was PCI and, whilst I designed a breakout box that would theoretically allow it to work, I couldn't guarantee the Creative drivers would be happy with my bodging. PCI-PCI-e converters were reporting mixed results. Spending £50 on parts and so on seemed silly to get an old PCI card to work when that £50 should really just go to getting a new card which has proper driver support. I would describe the on board sound as painful. It's not terrible through speakers but headphones are another matter entirely - my poor Grados sounded broken and it struggled to drive them. Depending on your use, you'll probably need to budget for a sound card as well.

6) I've never used the Windows software included with a mobo to configure it before so this was a new thing. I've always left it off as it seems like bloatware and is usually poor. Given when I was in the BIOS I found a load of stuff that was totally new to me and I needed to learn about, I decided to try this Windows based software. I was very disappointed to find that many changes require you to reboot on the spot with no way of delaying it or even backing out - you reboot or you reboot. So I turned on XMP and I was hoping I could do changes in bulk but no, demanded a reboot and there was no way to abort it. I'd plan to do your setting up in the BIOS with another laptop or something for reference. Don't do what I did and hope you can use the software and look things up at the same time. You'll be there all month rebooting all the time.

Now I'm getting in the shower before I take a hammer to these fans... ooh I just found an auto calibration thing.

Silence..... blissful silence.

Oh.... never mind. There it goes again.

[Ttaskmaster]

4) RGB headers are numerous, fan headers are not. You'll need splitters or a seperate fan controller if you have many fans. I looked at the board pictures and didn't read that most of the headers were RGB, thinking my cooling system would be fine. It is not and I DON'T WANT A GLOWING PC!

Most cases I've seen lately have fan hubs included.

Which model of mobo is this?

[ik9000]

msi ace x570 also exhibits fans fluctuating a lot. I think it's chip related. Need to find a way to deal with this also. I went fan shopping for low noise fans and have stuck the one noisy noctua I couldn't avoid due to space limitations with a throttle on it to stop it going full pelt. It's given me something I can tolerate even when it is fluctuating. Bizarre though after the steady behaviour of my current (still no1) win7 system

[Jonj1611]

I have a Aorus motherboard and I don't have any of those issues bar one which are the fan profiles, they are not very good out of the box.

App centre is rubbish but I have never had it try installing anything other than app updates. I have 4 x system fan headers and 2 x system fan/pump header, which I thought was enough, how many fans do you have? I used splitters on the top 3 fans to keep them tidy.

My onboard sound was good, so much so I ditched the X-Fi to use onboard

My SSD's and spinning drives booted instantly.

Maybe you have a bad board?

Mine is the GA-AX370 Gaming 5

[kalniel]

My last two mobos were Gigabyte - one was an X58 UD3-rev2 which was amazing but light on fan headers and slots, still have it. The second is my current Aorus Ultra? Z390. It's not quite as rock-solid as the X58 one, but it's instant booting, has more fan headers than I can shake a stick at and the smart fan control is the best I've used yet, resulting in a much quieter yet cool system than out of the box - once set up.

[ik9000]

I wish I'd bought the Aorus master. Was £80 difference when i bought. Dropped down by £65 the other week before I started the build. Typical!

[jimborae]

Aorus X570 Pro user here, pretty happy with it but as its test rig at the moment I'm not using it much. However yes the fan profiles are pants and the chipset fan is especially loud so I just set everything to silent. Cant comment on SATA compatability as I I've only used one cheapo SSD from MyMemory and it was fine all other drives are NVME.

[philehidiot]

It's an X570 Aorus Elite.

I found the solution to the fan profile issue. I posted the long solution on the review about the 3900 PC Hexus reviewed recently (on the front page) but the key was to stop it being smart and make it dumb.

Interesting to hear about ditching the X-Fi, the difference for me was insane. I tried it out on headphones, gave it a sanity check later on and then went and replaced the X-Fi elite pro with a new PCI-e card.

My main lingering issue is the SATA one. I've replaced all the data cables so I'm left wondering if it might be a PSU cable issue so I'll be replacing that at a later date.

As for case fans - I have three large case fans and then the AIO with two fans and a pump. I have an excessively large Corsair Carbide 540 case which I got as I never move my PC (all 17Kg+ of it now!) and fiddle inside it occasionally and I just can't stand not having space to work. So effectively I've got 5 fans to power. There are two CPU outputs and then two chassis fan outputs and then FIVE RGB strip headers!

I'm not complaining too much, my post is more a warning to any potential customers that these issues are taken into account. I've generally been pretty happy. It IS trying to feed my CPU 1.44V with standard clocks which is totally OTT and when I manually set it and measure it, it's still 1.44V.

[kalniel]

As for case fans - I have three large case fans and then the AIO with two fans and a pump. I have an excessively large Corsair Carbide 540 case which I got as I never move my PC (all 17Kg+ of it now!) and fiddle inside it occasionally and I just can't stand not having space to work. So effectively I've got 5 fans to power. There are two CPU outputs and then two chassis fan outputs and then FIVE RGB strip headers!

Which begs the question, why did you choose that mobo instead of a different Aorus model? I just checked and I have EIGHT fan headers.

[philehidiot]

Which begs the question, why did you choose that mobo instead of a different Aorus model? I just checked and I have EIGHT fan headers.

Price and bundled mobo. I was going to go for a Ryzen 5 but a bundle with this mobo came up for not a lot more than that build and made a 3900x viable if I dropped RAM to 16GB and reused my existing AIO. It made a lot of sense. Going to another mobo would have cost substantially more. I'll just be using a splitter so it's not a major issue but it's an annoyance and, as I said, something for people to check Vs their needs as I was caught out by just looking over the PCB and not cross referencing what I saw with the specs.

Interesting development - when I first got the board the SATA bug was present and so I updated the BIOS and reset. The SATA bug remained and so I removed the oldest SSD and it would at least POST. One of the issues has been a constant 1.44V being thrown at the CPU leading to a 35W draw at rest.

Something else went screwey and the BIOS reset itself (crash and 3 x autoreboot during POST). Definitely reset everything as my RAM is back to 2666, not XMP settings. Now the CPU power management is working properly with a variable voltage to the CPU and cores sleeping when not in use. The errors relating to SSD usage have gone as well, so I'm planning on hooking all the SATA drives up again and seeing what happens.

So far, it's looking like early BIOS bugs which weren't properly resolved by the update as it just didn't reset things properly. Looks like knickers fully got in a twist and it did a full reset of the BIOS. I was on a very early revision out of the box. Going to try and update to F12 now.

[Ttaskmaster]

Well I only have five fan headers, two of which are for CPU, so four isn't that bad. Pretty average based on my previous boards, in fact.
I suspect the larger quantity of RGB headers is because you can put something like 30w per fan header (which is, on vague averages, 14 fans per header), but only 2 RGB strips/fittings per RGB header.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

My mini-ITX B450I motherboard only has 3 in total.

[philehidiot]

Well I only have five fan headers, two of which are for CPU, so four isn't that bad. Pretty average based on my previous boards, in fact.
I suspect the larger quantity of RGB headers is because you can put something like 30w per fan header (which is, on vague averages, 14 fans per header), but only 2 RGB strips/fittings per RGB header.

Now that is something I was wondering. The manual tells me exactly what I need to do a V=IR and calculate peak draw on the RGB headers but not for the fan headers so I have no idea what I can draw off them. If you can do 14 fans a header it makes life a lot easier.

[Ttaskmaster]

but not for the fan headers so I have no idea what I can draw off them. If you can do 14 fans a header it makes life a lot easier.

First you need to know how many watts each fan draws at max revs. Mfr's website should tell you, if it ain't already printed on the box. You do keep the boxes, right?

On average, it will be about 2w... some as low as 0.5w, while a few draw as much as 7w. Most are aound 2-3w.
Then just play around with one of the SysFan headers while the system is running, see how many you can get on the header using splitters. Most modern boards will handle 3 fans easily and usually more.

Alternatively - Most fans use 0.1A (check with Mfr). Noctua Industrials go as high as 0.33A. Most headers offer 0.5 to 0.8A, but a Gigabyte rep has confirmed that yours should support a full 2A!!