Gigabyte Z790 Elite AX motherboard feature review and tests

oh this is the provoked prawn and this is the gigabyte z790 oros Elite ax and in this video I'm going to be unboxing this motherboard and setting it up with a number of things that you can see here talking about the features and highlights of it what it's like to use and some of the quirks that I found about it as well as just what's feature-packed about it because it is actually reasonably affordable coming in at somewhere around 250 dollars which is actually pretty remarkable for what you're getting because it has for example a pcie x16 Gen 5 slot so it's got Gen 5 pcie on the main slot at the top you've also got four Gen 4 pcie M2 connectors for nvme ssds which is nuts Wi-Fi six and multiple USB port connectivity HDMI DisplayPort loads of other things on there as well built in as standard and the ability to support up to 7600 Mega transfer ddr5 Ram as well all of that in a package that's really really affordable it's fairly understated and yet a reasonably nice looking board as you will have seen from those first couple of shots now I've built this motherboard in the land called 216 which I've done a video on separately I'll leave links to in the description and talked about the highlights of it and other things but we're using C is this setup and what you get in the box and then the setup process for it and the things I found along the way now in the Box you don't get very much for your money you just get the motherboard and then you've got a wireless antenna for the Wi-Fi you have SATA connectors for your data transfer and then you have a little adapter for your front panel connector which is one highlight if you've got loads of separate fiddly wires that you need to plug into the motherboard for your front panel reset switch power switch and other connectors I didn't actually have to use that in my build but if you do need it it's there and then you've got a couple of SATA cables connection of hard drives and ssds if you're going to be using those and then obviously the the aerial for Wi-Fi but you do also have ethernet connectivity on this so there's loads of going on here already you can see you've got Wi-Fi for example on a reasonably affordable motherboard this is pretty cheap really considering what it is it's LGA 1700 so it supports both 13th and 12th gen Intel processors and for this build I'm using an Intel Core i5 13600k so a reasonably affordable CPU and some other pretty decent spec things I'll get two in a bits including the gigabyte 4070 TI as well so now I want to give you a look at the various different highlights of the motherboard and the things of interest you'll see one of them that struck me immediately is that top pcie M2 mvme Port has a really chunky heat shield on it which is interesting the rear of it you also have loads of iOS there's absolutely loads of USB connections which is always really nice I think because it's nothing more annoying than not having enough of those and then obviously other things as well as you've got a bios port on there for example for flashing firmware updates which is pretty handy and then you've got connectivity for other things including Optical your 3.5 mil connections DisplayPort and HDMI if you need to troubleshoot for any reason and other bits as well so there's lots lots of there there's already really feature packed just getting out of the box to have this many ports and this flexibility is really good I'll leave all the specs in the description we could see there's multiple USB 3.2 ports on there you also have six SATA ports for connecting up hard drives and ssds although you need to take that with a grain of salt because if you connect multiple M2 nvmes you actually disable a couple of these ports and I'll show you what I mean a bit later on on that so it's worth bearing that in mind so I want to go into the little nitty-gritty on things like that just in case you're thinking about buying this motherboard and then basically installing everything you possibly can in it because you will come unstuck but what you're seeing is a fairly understated motherboard that's rammed full of features it also has loads of different connectivity ports on here and access to various things with highlights that include multiple RGB headers for example which was came in really handy with the build that I did with the land called 216 you can see that you've got a dled 2 up here which is a 5 volt header and there's also a 12 volt RGB header in the top right for example and then you have two more of those in the bottom left as well which is fantastic if you're connecting multiple RGB fans and RGB things into it which I was you'll also see obviously the front panel connection the bottom right which also has multiple different sys phone connections for your chassis fans and then your front panel audio on the left hand side two USB connections as well so you have enough reasonable amount for USB connectivity there there's also a q flash button it's worth noting some of the hardware level buttons on the motherboard because one of them came in handy and I want to talk about that in a little while why it's handy you've got USB 3.2 front panel connection and USBC as well it's only a single one of each of those but that's pretty standard and the slotting in for that was pretty straightforward the reason I'm showing this is actually I use this clip to demonstrate how to do this during the build process on the land call case and then when I went to remove the USB a front panel connection the plastic housing around it actually came off with it so that was one sort of downside I found to the build quality of this in the paperwork it basically says this is a really robust motherboard and I actually found that was one thing that showed that it wasn't however that was the only problem that I really had with it at Hardware level there is one problem I had with XMP which I'll get into a bit later on now if you need to connect to ssds and hard disk drives you do that on the right hand side down these bottom of the SATA ports but as I said earlier you need to make sure you read the manual and what I'll show you in a minute because if you are connecting multiple drives you may find problems now there were some interesting quirks of this board so for example I'm using an all-in-one pump to call the CPU and this build so you can see this is of course a h-150i elite LCD so that AIO pump header is cisfan 4 pump which is on the bottom right of the motherboard which means you have to stretch the cable down to the bottom there usually you'd have an AIO pump header at the top this has CPU fan and CPU fan optional but it doesn't have that connection in a logical place for me now I want to talk about nvma ssds now these are the best drives around in my opinion because it's really nice to be able to just connect these up really quickly and easily there are multiple ports on here the top one is likely to be the fastest but they all are running at X4 speed which is interesting and you can also raid on this motherboard that's not something I did because I had two drives I haven't gone into a full test of what you could do with raiding if you use multiple drives but you'll see that you have thermal pads on both sides and obviously that top one also has a really chunky heat shield as well so if you install it properly stripping off all the stickers and everything should find it runs really cool now it's worth noting that this is the latest generation of motherboard and yet it doesn't have pcie Gen 5 mvme Port only Gen 4 so more expensive motherboards do have the Gen 5 variants of this which is interesting because those are starting to come to market now so if you wanted a really fast like even faster than Gen 4 you could opt for that Gen 4 runs up to about 7000 megabytes a second gen 5 is looking at 10 to 12 000 depending on where you get them from but you know if you're not too bothered about that and you want to save money agenda 4 is perfectly acceptable and considering this motherboard's reasonably affordable anyway you probably wouldn't want to then slap a really high-end expensive gen 5. drive into it but there's just a minor point but there are four M2 ports on there that you can see so you take that Shield off and you've got three more underneath there so you can install multiple drives into this as well so if you have the money and you want to go crazy with storage you could slap in loads of drives into here now it does say that they all run at X4 speeds and I did test both the drives that I did use and that did work that way but sometimes if you populate all the drives and then also try and populate the status you're using up a lot of Lanes on the motherboard that can result in slow down and sometimes you might find that it drives Runner X2 speed instead of X4 now I wasn't able to test it with this one but I just do that heed that warning I've done a more in-depth guide on that and talked about it in the past and it's worth referring to the manual on the logic of this because what I found is there's a block diagram here in the manual which shows you sort of logic of how the M2 drives connect up to the various things so you can see the top ones connected up to the CPU and you'll notice that you've got an X4 on it also all the other drives suggest X4 but this one down here so M2M underscore SB is connected up basically so the SATA ports are connected with it as well so you have the option there if you're running all four ports full of MV me ssds you actually end up disabling some of the SATA ports so this is worth bearing in mind if you're filling out all of those and also using hard drives and ssds then you will be disabling some of the ports on this if you find that the hard drives or ssds aren't working then this is the reason why some minor points but hopefully useful to you so as I said I'm using the Intel Core i5 13600k which is an affordable CPU to go along with an affordable motherboard I actually found there's a really good combination of these to talk a bit more about this in my case review but also just about this in general is that I found that actually the performance of this was surprisingly good this setup it ran really well I was able to record footage and play at 4K capturing footage benchmarking playing games with reasonable FPS against some good experiences out of it I actually also was recording using the Intel CPU while playing as well so I did a mix of both recording with the graphics card and recording with the CPU so surprising really good what you can do with this now this is a ddr5 board so I'm using Kingston Fury Beast this time two sticks of ddr5 you need to install those in A2 and B2 you can see the markings on the left hand side of the ports here basically just slipping those in now an interesting point here is obviously you can use XMP on here to boost the speed of that and as I said it claims up to 7600 Mega transfers a second in terms of the speed it can manage these sticks actually go up to 6 000 potentially I did know in the description in the manual again it says so the support is up to 5600 which is interesting but it's basically overclocked with the XMP you can go up to 7600 But what I found was actually had some problems with this setup and I'll talk a bit more about that later on that XMP basically caught me into a boot loop so I want to talk about how I solve that and show you it as well so stick with me for that if you're interested now I want to show you some of the installation process for or the CPU because this is an LGA 1700s and if you don't know already you do need a new bracket for this and new setup so you can't often reuse all the old motherboards because you need new standoffs slightly different design from the previous generation it's a wider longer socket so you need to make sure you've got the right thumb screws and standoffs and other parts for this to make sure all brackets together really nicely I had the kit you can buy extra or you can get it from manufacturers more recent models of all-in-one coolers will work without a problem but if you're trying to reuse an old one you might have a bit of an issue because you can't just reuse that same bracket from LGA 1200 for example so in this instance as I said I'm going to be using the Corsair h150i Elite LCD display on here as well as the pump head and there was just that one complain about that cable running down to the bottom but it is a nice cooler it does give guns good performance for what it is and a good setup so here you can see the installation process in the land called 216 RGB plenty of room around this motherboard actually suits it quite nicely as well because you've got some great accents on the case and on the motherboard and the setup was fairly straightforward you got two eight pin CPU power connectors for the top left and then a 24 pin power connector on the right hand side I've already showed you most of the other connections as I said I've gone to a lot of depth on how to set this up and how to build on it in that video so if you want to see this full video check out the description to see more in this one I'm going to concentrate more on the features of the motherboard and what you can do with it and the things of interest about it as well because there are a number of them as you've seen already is quite a few things of interest here and one of the highlights for me was those RGB connectors because it allowed me to make sure that all the RGB was working as it should but also just the fact that you've got ddr5 obviously the support for fast Ram fast processor potentially depending on your money and also multiple different connections on the rear of your 2.5 gigabit LAN Wi-Fi 6E and multiple other things so you get a load a loads of things for your money here with only a few very minor complaints or issues so once we get through that build process into the next part I turn it on and start setting it up now you'll see some of the RGB here it's a little bit problematic and I did know that in the build so what I found was I hadn't connected up properly I was actually trying to heal because this is more related to the case than the motherboard because I was trying to use the headers that would come in the case and I was trying to connect too many things to the single or 5 volt RGB header in the bottom left but the fact that you've got two means that you can split things out so here you can see for example the RGB streamers are working both on the graphics card and on the motherboard then you've got all the fans on the case also give separate but syncable RGB lighting and that means you can control all that from the motherboard software then straight into the BIOS now you can see we've got a few things of interest going on here we've got these cr5 Ram which is currently set to 4 800 megahertz but you can put it into XMP and then boost it up to 6000 you'll also notice this system fan 4 which is for the pump is spinning down the bottom there but then you can see as well you can get some information on what speed the M2 drives are running at so you can see it's Gen 4 x4 at the moment in there I did also do some benchmarking with Crystal dismark a bit later on to sort that out you'll also note that you can change through different XMP profiles and that is important because when I say it to the XMP that would boost it up to the fastest speed that's 6000 Mega transfers I actually came across problems with the boot looping which I'll get to in a second and show you how I fixed it but you can go through other ones so if you do have a similar problem basically you need to get back into the house and change it to those other things you can also adjust X and P settings within gigabytes Command Center Software as well so it's worth bearing that in mind and there's a variety of other settings to dig around and look for or within the BIOS there's quite a few things in here one of which I was looking for which is resizable bar so the resizable bar settings allow you to improve the performance of your graphics card it was actually set to Auto as standard so we want to do is make sure that it's set to on so that it was working properly now the other thing you can do is you can go into the smart fan settings so if you need to adjust the fan curves you can do it from any here you also have the option to do this in the command control center if you download that and use it in Windows but the other thing to look out for is to make sure that your fans are set to a pwm mode if you do have pwm controllable fans then you do have options on the right hand side to adjust that find those and make sure you set it properly so you can see that usually it's set to Auto what you want to do is set it to pwm if you have the ability to control them separately so for example the Lee and Lee fans that I've got installed I want them in pwn mode because you gives you control to then adjust the fan speed from the software and also to make sure that they're spinning as they should be so you have all these options to control it in this the BIOS there's actually pretty decent settings in the blast reasonable customization and options in here to do all those things and then you can just save and restart so I didn't make a massive amount of changes but you want to make sure that X and P was on and recycled was the bar was on and the fans are set to pwm mode but what I found was that I then got stuck in a boot loop so that was a bit of an issue now there is a switch on the right hand side you can see here if you look closely right at the right hand side it says CLR underscore SW you may well need this because what I found was I got stuck in a boot loop and it was just loading over and over every time I turned it on it would just get stuck load and then reload so what I had to do is reach in and press that button into the motherboard behind a vertical GPU mount in order to get it what that does is that clears out the CMOS resets the settings I have to go back into the BIOS and change the XMP settings again select a different one so I actually ended up trying to run that Ram at a lower speed now ddr5 can be a bit hit and miss it could just be the modules that have got to be in problematic you might not have this problem but if you do that's the way to fix it now as I said you can go into the control center and you can adjust various things in there I did find there was some RGB problems I've done a video separately on this I found the RGB wasn't perfect on the graphics card it worked really well for the rest of it though so you can sync up the RGB lighting with the graphics card with the motherboard and with the other things that are connected to it around various different benchmarks on it in this setup I'm going to go into depth on that on the land call review because it was mostly about the temperatures and the performance there rather than the performance of the motherboard the overall experience with this has been great though it's a really affordable board with lots of great features to it and I would recommend considering it you've made it right at the end of the video you brilliant Legend you if you've enjoyed it click that subscribe button give me a thumbs up and drop me a comment down below if you've got any questions if you really enjoyed it consider joining the channel and see the benefits of doing so check out these other videos you might well find them interesting or useful and most importantly have a great life

Channel: The Provoked Prawn

Views: 76,306

Keywords: Provoked Prawn, The Provoked Prawn

Id: 8WK7VmuxFxo

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 20 2023