GoKawiilThe Gigabyte X870E Aorus Xtreme AI Top is a powerful, feature-rich flagship motherboard with strong performance across the board. With the refreshed X3D version out, the steep price and lack of reginements make it worthwhile, but only if you can buy it at the refurbished price.
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Gigabyte’s X870E Aorus Xtreme AI Top has finally landed in our lab for testing. The AI Top has been out for a while now and is the pinnacle of AM5 motherboards for the brand. This version offers plenty of awesome things, but it also made some curious choices for a high-end motherboard. First, you get a premium product through and through. From the appearance to the features, there’s no doubt it’s a quality offering. And now priced at $599.99 for a refurb (but still over $1,200 from a 3rd-party seller new), it’s one of the more expensive ones new, as it’s no longer available in large numbers, given the newer X3D version.
The Xtreme AI Top comes with four M.2 sockets (one PCIe 5.0 x4) and four SATA ports for storage, dual 10 GbE ports and fast Wi-Fi 7, last-gen flagship-class audio, plenty of USB ports including 10 on the rear IO (two USB4 40 Gbps Type-C), and even has multiple DIY-friendly features (including screwless M.2 designs, to EZ Wi-Fi plugs) to entice you into buying. Using the latest BIOS, it also enhances X3D chips' performance by simply enabling an option in the BIOS, just like the more expensive X3D (read: refresh) boards - though you don’t get any of the updated features some may have. We do like how it looks overall, but we were surprised not to find an LCD screen on the VRM heatsink, as most of its peers had (and even on their original AM5 flagships).
Performance on this board using the latest BIOS (F12a with AGESA 1.3.0.0) was among the best we’ve seen. It’s this way because, by default (we only enabled Expo profile for the RAM; Expo AI Boost, and high bandwidth support were disabled), there’s some magic sauce in the RAM bandwidth, as you’ll see later, improving all facets of the AIDA64 testing rather significantly.
The increased bandwidth and slightly reduced latency improved some of our results, yielding some of the fastest times we’ve seen in Handbrake, and it did very well in gaming. In short, this board performs quite well across a wide range of tests and games, thanks to the bandwidth increase that seems baked in when enabling the Expo profile on the base kit.
Below, we’ll examine the board's performance and other features to determine whether it deserves a spot on our list of the best motherboards . But before we share test results and discuss details, here are the specifications from Gigabyte’s website.
Specifications of the X870E AI Top
Swipe to scroll horizontally Socket AM5 (LGA 1718) Chipset X870 Form Factor E-ATX Voltage Regulator 22 Phase (18x 110A SPS MOSFETs for Vcore) Video Ports (1) HDMI (v2.1)
(1) HDMI (Front, v 1.4)
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