GoKawiilThe Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Elite Duo X is a well-rounded mid-range board with strong connectivity and CQDIMM support for those few who need the increased density and speed it provides – and it's a solid value under $280. The board faces stiff competition, but is a smart choice for Core Ultra-based refresh builds.
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The Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Elite Duo X motherboard is the first of several Z890 refresh motherboards we expect will land on our test bench in the coming weeks. Hailing from the budget mid-range side of the tracks, the Duo X supports the latest and greatest Intel processors, including the newest Arrow Lake refresh chips in the Core Ultra 270K Plus and 250K Plus, as well as the original Core Ultra chips. In addition to native Arrow Lake Refresh refresh support, Gigabyte adds an “Ultra Turbo Mode” to easily extract maximum performance from your system (details on that later), and it's one of the first to be compatible with high-density CQDIMMs (Clocked Quad-rank Unbuffered Dual In-line Memory Modules - think high-density, high-speed modules).
The Z890 Aorus Elite Duo X ( $279.99 ) comes well-equipped for a budget mid-range board. One of its primary differentiating features is CQDIMM compatibility, designed for high capacity and high speed, enabling 256GB (2x128GB) capacities and speeds up to DDR5-8000. With that much RAM, you typically need four sticks, and there’s no chance to run close to those speeds with four sticks, as it’s too much stress on your memory controller. So, for those who want or need higher RAM capacities, you can now have that and higher speeds. To be clear, Gigabyte doesn’t officially support CQDIMMs, but it does allow them to work with the Core Ultra CPU.
Outside of that, you’ll find five M.2 sockets (one PCIe 5.0) and four SATA ports for storage, Wi-Fi 7 and 5 GbE networking, a last-gen flagship-class audio codec, capable power delivery, 64MB driver BIOS, and several DIY-friendly features, including the M.2 EZ-Latch Click and EZ-Latch plus to secure your M.2 module and its heatsink. Finally, the PCIe EZ-Latch Plus lets you easily remove the graphics card with the push of a button. On top of the hardware, Gigabyte’s Ultra Turbo mode is said to increase performance by up to 40% (in specific situations) on Ultra 200S Series (K-SKUs) CPUs with a single click, and you can overclock through the BIOS or the AI Snatch software.
Performance with the latest BIOS (F2) is fine, at least compared to our Core Ultra 7 270K Plus review , where we had a couple of similar benchmarks and settings. The performance portion of the review focuses more on Intel 200S Boost and Gigabyte’s one-click overclocking presets than on comparisons with other boards at the moment. We really didn’t see much out of the 200S profile, but did see some worthwhile gains out of the Level 2 setting. We tried the ‘Level 3, Extreme’ setting, but our CPU wasn’t stable enough to complete the test suite (particularly Cinebench R26 or other heavily multithreaded tests). We’ll cover the details in the overclocking section.
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 Aorus Elite Duo X
Swipe to scroll horizontally Socket LGA 1851 Chipset Z890 Form Factor ATX Voltage Regulator 19 Phase (16x 60A DrMOS MOSFETs for Vcore) Video Ports (1) DisplayPort (v2.1)
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