Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsGreat board, except on tragic flaw....
Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2020
I love this board, and the Gigabyte Bios is easy to navigate. The bios is laid out kind of weird, but it's functional and once you get used to it, it's great. The board performs great for gaming and content creation. Tons of IO and Thunderbolt. Here's the rub. IF you plan on using higher end M.2. NVME SSD drives, eg Samsung 970 EVO/PRO, and you have a full sized RTX 2070 or 2080 GPU, you will throttle your drives. I have tried both EVO and PRO drives in both slots and the proximity of the M.2. slots to the PCI slots is a flaw. It's never a good idea to put an M.2. drive under a graphics card. The top slot fairs better than the bottom slot, but, because it's situated further back, it sits right above and or below the sweet spot on most graphics cards. I did try budget style ssd and still got very high temperature ratings. The Samsung drives and the budget drive respectively post temps in the upper 50c to 90c ranges under light use. Please note, the Samsung drives mentioned do run hot, upper 30c to 50c is normal. 50 to 90 is not though and suggests the drive is being exposed to excess heat. BTW, I have a full ATX case and plenty of cooling via Noctua fans. Gaming with these configurations caused all 3 drives to throttle in almost any instance. I reached out to Gigabyte about this and they agreed that the placement of the slots is detrimental to functionality under heavy load. A lot of their Aoraus (sp) boards use the same layout. You can search this online too and note there are a lot of complaints about this. I've been using this board for nearly a year now, and recently did the M.2. upgrades. It's a shame, because as I stated earlier, this board is awesome. I'm forced to go back to Asus which puts their M.2. slots far and away from the PCI slots.. My Designaire will be for sale soon on Ebay. I hope this helps out anyone that is looking to build a higher end machine.
