AMD’s CPU pricing is becoming more competitive by the day and they’ve just announced a new range of X3D models based on Zen4 with 3D V-Cache, but motherboard pricing remains stubbornly stable. With overall platform costs declining but ‘boards still coming in with hefty increases over the previous generation, how does the $500/AU$830/£510 X670E AORUS MASTER stack up against its competition?

Of the X670E motherboards we’ve reviewed thus far, this model is most comparable to MSI’s similarly priced X670E Carbon WiFi, another $500 design with most of the trappings of AMD’s flagship chipset. On paper the power delivery is slightly weaker with two fewer main power phases, but broadly the feature sets of the two motherboards are close to identical. There are meaningful differences in board layout, particularly the positioning of the PCIe 5.0 x16 slot and hence the Carbon WiFi’s greater restrictions for GPU cooler thickness if users wish to have ancillary PCIe x4 slots populated, but long-term perhaps the biggest gulf is in AORUS’s documented support for the new wider M.2 SSD standard.

The same cannot be said for performance however, where benchmarks indicated that the AORUS model is the weaker of the two. The AUROS MASTER suffers from some perplexingly poor SATA file system bandwidth scores, and likely as a result poorer PC Mark 10 overall scores, but by the same token it also achieves slightly lower power consumption results. VRM cooling under load doesn’t appear to be an issue, but idle figures are higher than typical for both this and the AORUS XTREME, reflecting reservations we have over the heatsinks.


That being said, at this point these disparities aren’t quite enough to push us towards the CARBON WIFI and away from the AORUS MASTER as most of our important work would be performed on M.2 storage (where both are neck-a-neck) and VRM temperatures under load being a more significant concern long-term. If anything, our overall adoption of GIGABYTE or MSI’s RGB lighting system (RGB Fusion and Mystic Light respectively), valuation of MSI’s reinforced PCIe slots, or GIGABYTE’s EZ Latch Plus for graphics cards will have the most impact. And to be honest, if we were installing and removing GPUs frequently (through sequential tests for instance) the latter would hold a lot of weight.

Aesthetically, each will appeal to different audiences. MSI could have scored a home run by toning down many of the embellishments on their motherboard’s heatspreaders, but GIGABYTE’s heavy silver accents won’t do it any favours for some portion of the enthusiast market.

More generally, the AORUS Master reinforces the separation between $500 and $750 X670E boards. The latter are far more feature complete, but raw performance is broadly the same under conventional settings (some strange exceptions notwithstanding). High-end overclocking is beyond the scope of this review, but typically your CPU cooling solution and the silicon lottery plays a greater role than expected disparities between the Master and Xtreme AORUS models (for instance) until you hit the bleeding edge.

The AORUS MASTER is another strong member of a widening X670E range that challenges other models in its price bracket without compromising the advantages of more expensive designs. It holds plenty of promise to gamers and perhaps even more to those for whom CPU overclocking is a strong factor in their purchase. That being said, preference for niche proprietary features or even aesthetics may be the deciding factor in opting for this over a similarly priced competitor.



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