Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite WiFi 7 Review

Introduction

For the money, Gigabyte has been pretty hard to beat recently and for a big wad of change left from $300, the Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite Wi-Fi 7 seems to pack a punch in the value department, at least on paper. There’s the somewhat dubious upgrade over older 600-series chipset models. The board is equipped with all the modern features you would expect. These features will support you through the lifespan of Socket AM5 and possibly a year or two beyond without any future shortcomings. At $270, it’s a good deal, especially since the board also looks great in the current market climate.

From the top, the headline features are a pair of USB4 ports, Wi-Fi 7, PCIe Gen 5 support for the graphics card and an M.2 port, all the M.2 ports have heatsinks too. Gigabyte hasn’t skimped on the audio and even includes a HDMI output on the PCB for case displays and a USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 front Type-C header. You have everything you need here except if you want to use more than one PCIe Gen 5 SSD, or more than two M.2 SSDs of any type in total, in which case you’ll start to steal lanes from your graphics card, but we’d imagine those configurations are probably unlikely for most users.

There are cheaper options out there of course, but even using the same chipset, you quickly start to dial up M.2 slot lane stealing and reducing the number of ports that are usable without bandwidth issues or ports being disabled. You also start to see downgrades in audio and cooling. Stepping up to X870E doesn’t immediately give you more flexibility either, as the X870E version of this board, which costs $50 more, still sees a degree of PCIe lane sharing between M.2 ports and your graphics card if you’re filling a lot of slots. You can save a bit of cash going for B650E, but again, you quickly start to see the same limitations creeping in as well as the loss of features such as Wi-Fi 7.

Specifications