Final Words & Conclusion
Final words & conclusion
With the Aorus Gaming 3 Gigabyte offers a more affordable X299 motherboard. Make no mistake though, there is an Intel X299 chipset on there and Intel is charging a premium price for that chip. So even this 'more affordable' mobo sits at a € 289,- / 299 USD marker in pre-order. This price varies a bit per country of course. Honestly, for what it is and offers I feel it should likely be a hundred bucks cheaper. But again, a lot of variables come into play and Intel is charging big bucks for the chipset and other license fees. The motherboard itself is lovely though as it has very decent looks, an okay feature-set and a strong basis for overclocking. Lacking however is a bit of Ethernet extravaganza in the form of AC / AD WIFI and or 5/10 Gbps Ethernet jacks. At this point in time and given the price range, either one of them really should have been included IMHO. Overall the Gaming 3 offers pretty much what the X299 chipset can push, but that still is fairly feature-rich and being Gigabyte, this is a well-designed motherboard. There is little you would disagree with me on that one. In this price category it would have been nice to see a third M2 slot much like the competition is doing. But sure, with the two M.2 slots you are covered and can go RAID with them as well. The looks overall are lovely in its black look (though looks are personal and thus a subjective preference). Gigabyte also offers an easy to tweak platform from within their UEFI BIOS. The LED design is not too much out there but intricate enough to impress. The two primary graphics card PCI-Express slots have been LED lit as well, honesty it looks very cool.
Performance
With the current BIOS firmware the processor temps remain trivial, at ~80 Degrees C under full load conditions. Gigabyte seems to be bypassing the Intel recommended p-state spec as you can clearly see from power consumption levels, but currently is tweaking more and more at firmware levels to get those levels a bit more normalized. Intel right now tries to enforce a processor power state that keeps energy power consumption of the a bit more in line. With most synthetic benchmarks you will not notice huge perf differences. However the lower per core clocks and voltage states have a tremendous negative effect on game performance (in our experience). Once the motherboard manufacturers will disable this 'feature' or if you manually set the CPU Ratios in the BIOS, that P state changes and your game performance jumps up, back to normal and expected levels including games. However, your power consumption will now jump up as well as the temperature, both to the levels as seen in the original 7900X review.
Tweaking
Depending on choice of cooling, temperatures when the CPU is overclocked with added voltage, you are in for a challenge when compared to the last-gen Broadwell-E procs. Realistically if you already are on that or a Haswell-E platform, really there's little to get excited about upgrade wise. At the OC level you are looking at up-to 1.30~1.35V needed on that CPU core (depending on your frequency target and number of tweaked cores). Tweaking wise the infrastructure that X299 offers is easy to use, you increase the CPU voltage and multiplier and you are good to go. With a Core i9 7900X and a good LCS (liquid cooling) kit you can achieve roughly 4700~4800 MHz. For memory the sky is the limit as the Intel platform is that over the years they have been able to refine their memory controllers, pop in anything XMP 2.0 and you have a 90% chance it'll work straight out of the box with very fast memories. However, the effect of fast clocked memory is far less significant for Intel opposed to AMD Ryzen. Also with quad-channel memory available as an option, we'd always suggest to go with a more affordable 2677 MHz kit, as bandwidth on quad-channel simply is not relevant to your gaming experience. You are better off with more memory. Voltage wise we can recommend you to leave that CPU voltage at 'auto', this got us towards 4700 stable and keeps the temps in-line at sub-90 degrees C (if you can call that in-line). BTW you will need some sort of liquid cooling as the 10 cores heat up pretty badly once you tweak.
Power consumption
Depending on the hardware p-state the motherboard is fitted with, your numbers will be all over the place. So, with ten cores you get a 140 Watt TDP processor. With the system at idle with a GeForce GTX 1080 installed / 16 GB memory / SSD and the X299 motherboard I hovered at roughly 75 Watts in IDLE with the newest BIOS. That's just fine really, the load values are however significant. When we stressed the processor in a 100% run we reach roughly 350 Watts with this is a ten core part (it was a Prime 1024M stress test though). So, we go from 75 Watts towards 350 Watts. With changed power states (which the manufacturers will change in a BIOS update) you could be looking at the 300 Watts marker. When we game we hover at 380 Watts with the GeForce GTX 1080, but obviously that factor is dependant on the type of graphics card you use of course and, sure, most games certainly do not utilize the ten CPU cores.
Something to keep in mind
We quickly have to discuss PCI-Express lanes, as honestly here is Intel just goofing up. Here is the breakdown:
- Kaby Lake-X quad core gets 16 PCI-Express Lanes 3.0
- Skylake-X six and eight core procs get 28 PCI-Express Lanes 3.0
- Skylake-X ten core procs get 44 PCI-Express Lanes 3.0
DDR4 Memory
Ever since Haswell-E was released along came DDR4 memory. With Skylake-X DDR4 may be clocked a notch faster at 2,677 MHz. Honestly, if you pick up some nice 2,133 MHz DIMMs, at quad-channel they'll offer more than plentiful bandwidth. A 3,200 MHz kit for example is far more expensive and does offer better bandwidth but the performance increases in real-world usage will be hard to find. Unless you transcode videos over the processor a lot. DDR4 mostly was released for lower voltages and higher frequencies. 2,133 MHz CL 14 or CL 15 memory in combo with quad-channel will already get you to 50~60 GB/sec. While impressive to observe for gaming you will not notice huge performance improvements with high memory bandwidth, but with content creation and video transcoding this kind of bandwidth certainly does make a difference. As always, my advice would be to go with lower clocked DDR4 memory with decent timings, but get more of it. Don't go for 8 GB, get four DIMMs and in total a minimum of 16 GB. And yeah, if you do not care about spending money, check the test page with the G.Skill RGB DIMMs at 3600 MHz, that is brilliant stuff though.
The bottom line
There is very little to complain about when it comes to the hardware and design that Gigabyte applies to the Core X series DiY PCs and motherboards. Seriously, these are nice looking top notch build quality motherboards. Intel however has been goofing up with a rushed Skylake-X launch. This review has shown you power consumption levels of that processor that go above and beyond as to what we deem is acceptable, hoever there is work in progress at BIOS level, these numbes will go down. On the flipside that coin: the board overall performs well and does manage to impress. The performance matter related to p-states tweaking focus mostly on gaming, and the true enthusiast are just that, you guys - the gamers. The baffling fact is that gaming on the last gen 10-core Core i7 6950X is butter-smooth, perfect with way less power consumption as well. The Core i7 i9 7900K simply is a challenge. This review is about the Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 3 motherboard. It is a proper motherboard alright and delivers what it needs to do. We do expect Gigabyte to be updating their BIOS a couple of times in the near future, as power consumption simply is too high. So yes, the platform does not feel as finished and refined as X99 is. In hindsight, X99 when it was released experienced a similar improvement curve. At one point I am certain, it will be an excellent platform. I can only speak for the 10-core 7900X processor, but Intel is looking at a processor series that runs hot and when fully and properly utilized, consumes significant amounts of power. You will need to get your cooling in order, we'd recommend a proper LCS cooler, or preferably a proper liquid cooling kit, especially if you plan to tweak. Tweaking, we reached 4.7~4.8 GHz on all cores, which is a significant step upwards from Broadwell-E (10-core 6950X), but here again voltages/temps/power will be trivial and the decisive factor. Since Intel allows per core tweaking, my advice would be to explore a little further, set say 4 cores at 4.8 GHz and the rest at 4.3 GHz. This might save you on power consumption, likely a lower voltage and thus the end result also is a processor that would run a bit cooler. It's just a tip though.
The Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 3 is a properly designed and fine looking motherboard, but everything in a PC is all about the symbiosis of all components, and thus this symbiosis can only be as good as the processor will allow it to be. Looking at purely the motherboard then it is all very simple, it is lovely and feature rich enough, has an a proper nice dark design and is well built with proper components. Features wise this kit offers many SATA 6 Gbps ports, the Intel Ethernet jack and the 7.1 channel HD audio. Gigabyte did not go over the top with RGB LEDs and did things subtle, I like that as well. The Gigabyte X299 Aorus Gaming 3 is easily recommended for what it is, a quality motherboard. However pricing (at the time of writing) indicates a price position in the 300 euro/usd range. I find that to be rather steep. These are preorder prices though so lets hope they will drop. Once that happens, recommended 4 for sure.
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