Board Layout and Pictures
It’s a little hard to take in some of the visual features on the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice because everything is whited out for the Iced theme other than some of the heatsinks which have a light silver finish that pairs well with the white. The Z890 Aorus Pro Ice has all of the plastic components on the board in white including the CPU socket protector even. Beyond that, it has large heatsinks around the CPU socket that tie in with the rear I/O and heatsinks over the chipset and the board’s FIVE M.2 slots. Those cover up most of the board except for the connections and features all around the outside edge. I was happy with the previous X870 Aorus Elite Wifi7 that I took a look at which had the black and grey finish, but the white looks even better for sure.
Let’s start by checking out the cooling around the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice and like I mentioned before a good majority of the board is covered up by it all. Up around the new LGA1851 socket, it has heatsinks at the top, left, and bottom of the CPU socket. The top and left heatsinks both serve the same function, cooling the board's VRMs. The Z890 Aorus Pro Ice has a 16+1+2 phase configuration half of those are under the left cooler and the other half are under the top heatsink. They have a heatpipe that ties the two together. The top heatsink has groves on both sides but the groves in the edge away from the CPU socket are deeper giving it an F-like shape and helping with more surface area. The heatsink on the side ties and doubles as the cover over the rear I/O. Looking in at the top they do have two more fins inside, but overall a majority of that space inside isn’t used, and unlike on some of the Asus boards they don’t have a heatsink tucked away inside of there to help cool the NIC.
Below the CPU socket, you have the first of the M.2 cooler heatsinks and this heatsink cools just one. This is the PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot so dedicated cooling is needed. The heatsink has a raised area on the left side in silver with the additional surface area then on the right, it is flat and has the white finish on it. What I like about it though is the quick disconnect setup which has a metal clip that you spin and release the left side of the heatsink. The right side is latched in so it just lifts up and out. The M.2 mount is similar as well, only plastic to prevent damage to the drive meaning you don’t need any tools to install a drive. Gigabyte had thermal pads on both the top heatsink and below the M.2 drive as well to pull the heat out all over. The bottom heatsink that covers most of the board has a similar mounting setup as well. It has two pins that connect on the right side and then one spin latch on the left holding it all down. This heatsink sits over the four other M.2 drives which are all PCIe 4.0. It is low profile to sit below your video card but does have the Aorus branding on it as well as the eagle logo in white on the silver brushed aluminum finish. On the right side, under it is a second aluminum heatsink that covers the chipset. There aren’t thermal pads between the two but metal-to-metal combined with what should be low temperatures from the chipset shouldn’t be too bad. These four M.2 drives have thermal pads on the top heatsink but there isn’t an underside heatsink or thermal pad on the bottom like the PCIe 5 drive slot has.
With the heatsink off we get a good look at the M.2 and PCIe slot configuration so we might as well touch on all of that. There are a total of 5 M.2 slots on the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice and three x16 length PCIe slots. The top slot is the only PCIe 5 slot and also the only slot that runs at full x16 bandwidth. This slot is designed with huge metal shielding as well to give it more strength to help hold today's large video cards. The two other slots towards the bottom of the board, while x16 in length have x4 and x1 lanes and are both PCI 4.0. Those run off of the chipset where the top slot ties directly to the CPU. Of the five M.2 slots, like I mentioned before the top slot is the only PCIe 5.0 option. That and the second slot which is PCIe 4.0 both run off of the CPU. The other three all run off of the Z890 chipset. Those are all PCIe 4.0 as well and the last slot also has SATA support as well. Surprisingly none of them don’t work if you are using a specific PCIe slot, but I guess that is also why those bottom PCIe slots are only 1x and 4x lanes. All of the M.2 slots support standard 2280 length drives but three of them support longer drives with the PCIe 5 slot going up to 25110 length M.2 drives.
Starting in the top left corner, let’s take a look at some of the features around the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice. Most of this area is filled with the CPU socket and the rear I/O but Gigabyte did fit in the two 8-pin CPU power connections up next to the top heatsink. They are both in a nice white to match the board and then next to that there is one 4-pin PWM fan header as well. A lot of boards have been skipping this fan header location and I’m glad to see it here because it is perfect for plugging in a rear fan on most cases.
While the top right also has the CPU socket as well as the four DDR5 RAM slots filling up a lot of its space, there is still a lot going on in this area. For starters the ram slots are all bright white, often with these white boards we still see these in black or silver. Gigabyte has also shielded the two main slots that you will be using unless you use all four DIMMs. Up above them are two 4-pin PWM fan headers for the CPU and next to that is an addressable RGB lighting header. In the corner itself, they have a white 2-digit display as a status/error code display and with that, you get power, reset, and a third button which is the QF Plus or Q Flash Plus button for flashing the BIOS. Next to the status display, there are small LEDs that let you know what part of the boot you are on and help when you have a boot issue that you need to diagnose. Along the side, the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice has a bright white 24-pin motherboard power connection. Then below that are two more 4-pin PWM fan headers (5 in total so far) and a DB sense header to plug in the included sound sensor. Last up below that is the USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 front panel connection.
The start of the bottom right quadrant has a large white button that is to the right of the top PCIe slot. This is the release button for the latch to make it easy to remove a large video card. If you haven’t fought with fitting something down in a tight space to push down on the clip, you don’t know just how helpful this is. Everything else on the right edge of the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice is all right-angled connections. You get four white SATA ports and a white legacy USB 3.2 connection. Then Gigabyte has also slipped in an HDMI port which might seem crazy but is a way to output to the small displays that a few new cases have inside. In the bottom right corner, you have the front panel connection which is all labeled. You then have three more 4-pin PWM fan headers (totaling 8 now). On the far left there are two USB 2.0 headers as well.
For the bottom left continuing along the bottom edge we have the TPM header. Then there are three RGB headers. Two are addressable RGB giving us a total of 3 and I’m happy to see one legacy regular RGB header here as well. On the far left is the front panel audio connection which is up against the audio chipset which has a white plastic cover over most of it. You can see that they have isolated at least some of that chipset with the PCB gap.
The rear I/O for the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice comes with the shield pre-installed which is commonplace but still great to see. It is bright white to match the rest of the board and beyond the Aorus branding, each of the connections is labeled as well so you can figure out what is what. On the far right, you have the audio connections. The Z890 Aorus Pro Ice runs the Realtek ALC1220 CODEC and while there are just line out, mic in, and optical connections it does support 2/4*5.1/7.1 channels. Next to that is the dual snap-in connection for the wireless antenna. It uses the Intel Wi-Fi 7 BE200 wireless NIC to get Wifi 7. There is one wired ethernet connection that runs on the Realtek 5GbE. From there everything else is a USB connection. There are two red USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports and below that there are two Type-C connections that support up to Thunderbolt 4. There are four USB 3.2 Gen 1 connections which are all blue and four standard USB 2.0 ports in white. What is missing however is an onboard video output. You can use the two Thunderbolt 4 connections to output to a display if you have a display that supports that. Beyond that, you can use the internal HDMI port.
You would expect to see a bright white bottom when flipping the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice over but surprisingly a majority of the bottom has a darker grey finish and they have some white accents with Aorus branding on it. The bottom does show that the base of the PCIe x16 slot has more support back here to give it more strength. Beyond that, we can see that some of the audio PCB is isolated, but there are three big gaps in it as well so there isn’t full isolation.
