Flagship motherboards are always fascinating specimens to review: Once the cuffs of, ahem, affordability have been removed, you never know quite what mix of features you are going to see. With its leading-edge Intel Z590 board, the Aorus Xtreme ($849.99), Gigabyte has opted to go in a different direction than some of its competitors by offering a board with less flair but a rock-solid set of features. You won’t find a dancing OLED display panel on this Extended-ATX (EATX) board, or integrated liquid-cooling hardware. Nor is there an obnoxious abundance of blinking or fading lights. But if you want a tip-top-high-end board for serious tweaking that doesn’t also glow like the sun, the Z590 Aorus Xtreme may be your best and only option. Just know: “Rocket Lake” 11th Generation CPUs were always going to be a dead end, even from the moment they were released, and this is a lot of dosh to sink into a one-time board, especially one with some initial installation hiccups on our end.
The Design: Understated, Sedate Power
The Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Xtreme is solidly black with only hints of silver and steel to add a little contrast. When the board is powered on, a few RGB LEDs set over the chipset heatsink and the rear I/O shroud illuminate, but these feel relatively subdued compared with many other boards that I’ve reviewed. As I’m someone who is not a fan of the overuse of RGB lights, the board’s overall look comes as a breath of fresh air.
One of the key design elements: You can’t see the PCB, hardly. Gigabyte seems to have tried to cover from view or touch almost every bit of the PCB that it could. You’ll still see a bit poking out around the CPU socket and at the top of the board, but otherwise it’s all masked by heatsinks and heat spreaders. Several of the headers and switches are even covered by plastic, which is a nice touch, because in addition to keeping the board looking clean, it also helps to prevent dust getting caught in unused pins.
A Look at at the Audio, Networking, and I/O
The audio jacks on the rear I/O panel are connected to a Realtek ALC1220 audio codec. This chip should be all too familiar to anyone who has bought a midrange or high-end motherboard in the last several years, as it’s been heavily used by board OEMs. Nothing really to complain about here, though, as the chip has high-end specs on paper, including a 120dB SNR rating. It would just be nice to see a little movement in this area again.
Gigabyte installed a dedicated audio chip for the front panel, which is an ESS ES9018K2M with even better specs than the ALC1220. In particular, this ESS chip supports 32-bit 384KHz audio, whereas the Realtek ALC1220 tops out at 32-bit 192KHz. A TI OPA 1622 operational amplifier (OP-AMP) is attached to the front audio system, as well, to help boost signal-output performance.
Gigabyte installed a 10Gbit Aquantia NIC on the Z590 Aorus Xtreme as its primary Ethernet adapter. This is among the fastest wired Internet controllers on the market today, and we don’t often see it on boards except for flagship ones. There’s also a secondary 2.5Gbps Ethernet chip and a built-in Wi-Fi 6E AX210 wireless controller. The Wi-Fi chip is no surprise here, though, as it’s integrated into the Z590 chipset.
The Z590 Aorus Xtreme’s rear I/O panel is a busy place, with eight USB 3.2 Type-A ports, two USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, five audio jacks, S/PDIF and HDMI outputs, and a pair of Wi-Fi antenna hookups. That’s not to mention the two RJ-45 jacks for Ethernet cables. At the top of the panel are two pushbuttons, one of which will clear the BIOS, the other one used to flash the BIOS with a new image.
Onboard Features and Board Extras
Overclocking was clearly a priority for Gigabyte in designing the Z590 Aorus Xtreme. The board is equipped with 20+1 power phases with 100-amp DrMOS circuits that are cooled by two heatsinks and a heatpipe. The board has two discrete BIOS chips, with switches to change between them, as well as buttons to clear the CMOS.
The board also has what Gigabyte calls a MultiKey. This element can be configured to do a few different functions, including commanding the board to boot directly to the BIOS on startup, or to boot into the BIOS using safe mode settings. Using a multimeter, you can also check the voltage of various components on the board directly, and safely, using a series of dedicated measurement contact points above the RAM slots.
No high-end board would be complete without a handful of unusual goodies thrown in for good measure, and the Z590 Aorus Xtreme doesn’t disappoint here. The board ships with a PCI Express M.2 card adapter that can hold two M.2 drives, effectively expanding the board’s number of M.2 slots from three to five.
There’s also an audio device that Gigabyte calls “ESSential USB DAC.” This device is an alternative audio device that’s supposed to provide better audio performance than either of the onboard audio chips. It plugs into a USB Type-C port and has a 3.5mm audio jack on the other end. Inside is an ESS Sabre ES9280CPRO DAC with two WIMA caps. The device is rated for an SNR of 131dB.
A Brief Look at the BIOS
Before digging into the BIOS, I should mention that I encountered some initial problems with getting the board up and running. When I first tried to boot the system, Core i9-11900K installed, the board would power on but would restart after a few minutes and never show anything onscreen. The onboard “88”-style LED debug panel showed numerous codes during this process, but this is standard procedure for any board as it boots, and it never seemed to stand on any trouble code in particular.
I proceeded to troubleshoot the board with all the usual methods. I tried flashing the BIOS, booting to both BIOS chips in turn (using the switches to go between them), and of course reseated the CPU and RAM. None of this worked, so I tried flashing the BIOS yet again, via multiple flash drives, and eventually I was able to get the board to boot. To be honest, though, I’m still mystified why it started working when it did. I had given up on it working at all and was prepared to write it off as a DOA sample to be changed out, after those multiple unsuccessful attempts to get the board to work.
Everything worked fine from this point on, too, so this could have been a fluke caused by an early BIOS. But it’s still something to be aware of, if you have similar issues. Getting things going may just take some persistence before you initiate an RMA.
The board boots into an easy-mode BIOS interface that shows basic system specs and operating conditions. There are few controls on this page, but in my opinion, it has everything it needs. You can set an XMP memory profile or adjust the boot sequence from here without having to go anywhere else, and realistically that’s all you need to get the system up and online.
Over on the side of the screen, you have options for entering a menu to flash the BIOS with Q-Flash, and another button will load you into the board’s native fan controller software to adjust how fans adjust their speed.
The advanced-mode BIOS on the Z590 Aorus Xtreme has a unique design element that I’ve not encountered on any motherboard that I’ve previously used. It’s not a special feature, but an anti-feature, of sorts: the removal of the useless “main” tab.
To explain: Most motherboards have a tab labelled as “main” as the first page in their advanced BIOS layout. I’ve grown steadily perplexed with this over the years, as the page is entirely pointless, tending to be a cut-down, text-based variant of the easy-mode BIOS without any real options. I know I’m making a fuss here over something rather small, but I’ve been waiting to see this page disappear from motherboards for a long time now, and am exceedingly happy to see it not on this one. Pay more, get less!
Lacking a main tab, the advanced-mode BIOS starts you off on the Tweaker tab, which shows overclocking options. The BIOS feels a bit clunky here, as you can’t click to scroll down lists, and it lags a little at times. The layout also feels like it could use some refinement. It’s almost entirely white text on a black background, with line gaps to separate items like CPU and RAM OC options. It’s a little hard on the eyes.
Everything is well-organized, and the BIOS is actually one of the easiest I’ve worked with, in terms of how simple it is to find options that I’m looking for. But there’s still room for improvement here. At a minimum, more should have been done to make folders stand out from menu options. Everything is just white text, and the only thing that differentiates a folder from a changeable setting is an orange square beside the folder name. This works, but highlighting folders with a different background color would make the BIOS easier to use.
Something else the BIOS could use is a few built-in tools. I test a lot of motherboards that have built-in tools for clearing data from SSDs for resale, and I’ve even had a few ship with Memtest86+ loaded into the BIOS. These aren’t essential items, but as this is an $849.99 motherboard, I’d expect a few more BIOS bones be thrown the buyer’s way.
The Supporting Software
Gigabyte sends out a number of software utilities along with the Z590 Aorus Xtreme, but not all of these worked for me. One of the programs I couldn’t get cranking was labelled as Easytune, which appears to be some sort of overclocking app. The other program that simply refused to work is called System Information Viewer. Both applications refused to open, even after trying multiple downloads and updating Windows to have the most recent updates available.
The rest of the programs included all opened and worked without issue. I’m not going to talk about them all in detail, as some are common programs and others are self-explanatory. Intel’s Fast Boot needs no real discussion, and the simply named App Center is exactly what it sounds like: an app store. Also here is the RGB Fusion program, for controlling RGB LEDs that comply with the protocol; cFosSpeed Internet Accelerator Software, for network management; and an OEM copy of Norton Internet Security.
Among the more notable programs is Game Boost, which helps to stop background tasks to free up CPU clock cycles. Think of it like Task Manager, except that it can keep watch on tasks so they don’t restart. There’s also the @Bios software, which can be used to update the board’s BIOS. It also has an option to add a custom splash screen that you’ll see every time the computer boots. Finally, there’s the Smart Backup utility, which can be used to back up your system data and create recovery images.
Verdict: A One-Way Rocket (Lake) Flight
Assuming that the initial problems we had getting this board to boot were an isolated glitch, there’s little to complain about on Gigabyte’s Z590 Aorus Xtreme…if you ignore the price! It’s feature-rich and well-built, but at $849.99, it’s one of the most expensive current-gen motherboards you could possibly buy. (If you simply have to burn more bucks on Z590, there’s always the $1,599 Z590 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce, and its integrated liquid cooling gear and channels.)
Our liquid-less Xtreme, though, doesn’t seem to offer an enormous amount of improvement over boards that are $100 or so less expensive. If you buy, make sure you need all the cool gewgaws in the box, including the external audio DAC solution and the M.2 PCIe card, because they are part of the big price. Unless money is no issue or you are planning to do some extreme overclocking where you might benefit from the 100-amp power phases, other Z590 options will be a much better value.
