Performance

When it comes to performance testing, typically motherboard to motherboard we aren’t going to see any big performance difference when running the same components and clock speeds. The exception to that is when boards are auto overclocking of course and there are a few areas where components can make a difference like with ethernet and USB controllers. For testing the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice, with it being the first Z890 board that I’ve tested I don’t have any comparison numbers for the test results below. Those will come later when I check out other Z890 options. However, I did want to focus on the network performance. Even just testing on our Wifi 6E network, not Wifi 7 which the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice supports. Its wireless performance was great at 1631 Mb/s. The wireled Realtek NIC is 5GbE and it was in line there as well at just under with 4743 Mb/s. I will say that the 5GbE NIC as a whole seems like a weight stopgap. I get the use of 2.5GbE NICs as that has become more popular in consumer hardware recently. But in any situation where you are getting the full speed out of a 5GbE NIC, you are running 10GbE network gear and might as well have 10GbE on the board. That said, given some of the reliability issues in previous generation 10GbE NICs maybe this is a happy medium for now.

Before finishing up my testing I did want to check out the lighting on the Z890 Aorus Pro Ice and Gigabyte has lighting in two locations. Up under the main M.2 heatsink, they have some undergrows, and then over the rear I/O that heatsink has the Aorus branding backlit. This is better than what I have seen on some boards which isn’t spread out at all and there isn’t too much lighting that will chase off someone who isn’t interested in lighting at all. Beyond that, you also have the status LED display as well. I was surprised to see that they did light that up in white to match the white board, that’s a nice touch!

I also ran the 286K using AIDA64’s CPU stress test with the FPU workload for a half hour to heat up the VRMs to get a look at how well the heatsinks were handling things there. The hottest spot in our thermal images was 53c but that was up against the CPU. 51.1c was how warm the PCB in the top left corner where the two sets of VRMs are closest as well as the CPU. The heatsink on top ran warmer than the larger one on the left but overall both heatsinks were spreading the heat around and cooling. A little larger on the top heatsink is the only thing that I would improve there.

• Motherboard
• ATX
• Z890
• LGA1851
• Gigabyte
• Aorus