Intel Z890 Motherboard Mega Guide (2025) — ASUS, ASRock, GIGABYTE & MSI

GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS MASTER — heavy thermal budget, creator-grade I/O

AORUS MASTER is the “throw everything at it” board. You keep a full-bandwidth PCIe 5.0 x16 PEG for the GPU and a CPU-attached PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 bay for OS/cache, then add a deep bench of PCIe 4.0 PCH M.2 under thick, finned shields. GIGABYTE’s “thermal armor” isn’t cosmetic; it’s dense extrusion with real finfield that holds SSD temps well into sustained writes, which keeps capture/ingest smooth while timelines render.

Connectivity lands squarely in creator territory: many regions get dual Thunderbolt 4 on the rear IO and 10GbE alongside Wi-Fi 7; others swap to single TB4 and 2.5GbE. Either way, it’s easy to run TB storage/displays while uplinking to a 10G NAS—no PCIe NIC required. QoL is excellent: EZ-Latch for PCIe/M.2, postcode + onboard buttons, and sensor-aware fan control that lets you bind a top intake to the M.2 sensor (my favourite trick to stop Gen4 throttling).

On the power side, the SPS VRM with tall fin stacks keeps i7/i9 all-core loads boringly stable; you can step one notch softer on LLC, trim guard-band voltage, and reduce fan sawtooth. Memory training is mature—high-7K XMP at 96–128 GB is very achievable, and telemetry exposes when a stick is marginal so you troubleshoot in minutes, not hours.

Spec snapshot

• ATX, high-count SPS VRM with heavy fin armor
• 4× DDR5 with robust XMP training/telemetry
• PCIe 5.0 x16 GPU; CPU-Gen5 x4 M.2 + several Gen4 M.2
• TB4 (often dual), Wi-Fi 7, 10GbE/2.5GbE (region)

Official page: Z890 AORUS MASTER