Overall and Final Verdict

With all of our testing out of the way, we can step back and look at the whole picture for the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice. The first thing that I have to say is that this is a great-looking motherboard. The Ice theme with its white with some silver accents looks amazing but it comes down to the details that set this one apart. Details like all of the small connections and plastic parts being white, even going as far as to have the status LED display being white and using white LEDs as well. Even the BIOS itself is a white/silver to match. Setting up a system in the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice was easy, especially their M.2 mounting setup which has a tool-less latch for the drive (standard these days) and tool-less latches for the M.2 heatsinks as well. On top of all of that, you get an impressive 5 M.2 slots in total with one being PCIe 5.0 and the others being 4.0. I was also impressed that even with 5 M.2 slots and the three PCIe slots, the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice doesn’t have any slots that don’t work when another device is being used. We see a lot of boards have an M.2 slot that stops working when you populate the second PCIe slot or something similar but that doesn’t happen here.

The Z890 Aorus Pro Ice did have a few downsides but most of these are small or nothing burgers. The biggest one was how the BIOS navigates. I ran into a few issues where the exit button for menus wouldn’t work and you have to click up top to restart, on top of that keyboard navigation didn’t seem to have a proper back button unless I missed it. The other issue, which a lot of people won't care at all about, was that the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice doesn’t have a traditional display output on the rear I/O. You get an HDMI inside for use with an internal screen which is nice and you have two Thunderbolt connections which can function as a display out, but a lot of people still need an HDMI or DisplayPort connection for their displays. This isn’t the setup that a lot of people will need or use their integrated graphics, but sometimes you do need it when it comes to diagnosing an issue for example. Beyond that, I noted that I would love to see a 10G NIC here and I did want to clarify on this one. The 5G NIC on the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice performed well and frankly, a lot of people don’t need more than a 2.5G, but with any 5GbE NIC, to use it you are going to be setting up a 10GbE network.

Overall though, Gigabyte did a great job with the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice. For pricing the MSRP is $399.99 which isn’t cheap. Especially once you pair it up with one of the new CPUs, but that is in line with the features you are getting. Gigabyte has also made a point to get their white motherboard pricing matched up with the black boards as well, so that premium that we used to see is no longer there which is great to see.

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Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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