The GIGABYTE X570 Aorus Xtreme Motherboard Review: Fanless AM4

Overclocking Ryzen 3000

Experience with the GIGABYTE X570 Aorus Xtreme

Users looking to get the most from the new Ryzen 3000 series of processors will likely be considering a little overclock. With the current iteration of Precision Boost Overdrive or PBO for short looking a little roughshod at present, the best performance gains can be had from simply overclocking the processor to a reasonable amount. A couple of things to consider first before overclocking your processor. Firstly the cooling is a considerable bulk of the potential overclocking yield as the Ryzen 3000 series tends to run quite warm, even at the default settings on the basic stock cooler. The second main variable is the motherboard that's been selected for the job. With cheaper motherboards which utilize weaker and less efficient power deliveries, with less durable designs. It is prudent to forward think these decisions before purchasing, but it's good to know that all of AMD's X570 all support overclocking from the bottom to the very top.

GIGABYTE's Aorus firmware, for the most part, is very easy to navigate around, with all of the overclocking related settings housed within the Tweaker sub-section of the advanced mode. As the X570 Aorus Xtreme is designed with overclocking in mind due to the impressive 16-phase power delivery, the firmware offers plenty of options for overclocking both CPU and memory. The CPU Core ratio can be adjusted in increments of 0.25 MHz which is useful for fine-tuning, whereas users can also enable memory X.M.P profiles and tweak memory with plenty of primary, secondary, and tertiary memory latencies settings which are found under the advanced memory settings section. Users can also enable Precision Boost Overdrive which is AMD's integrated CPU overclocking technology, but users can also fine-tune certain power variables for a more advanced and customized experience.

As with many vendors including its own pre-defined overclocking profiles, it's a little bizarre that a board of this pedigree has none for users to select from. Perhaps GIGABYTE has made an assumption that users looking to use the X570 Aorus Xtreme as the foundation for their new system might want to create everything themselves, but even a couple of basic profiles with general variables would have been nice to see; not everyone who spends a vast amount of cash is experienced in overclocking and profiles offer a gateway for novice users looking for extra performance from a simple click.

Overclocking Methodology

Our standard overclocking methodology is as follows. We select the automatic overclock options and test for stability with POV-Ray and OCCT to simulate high-end workloads. These stability tests aim to catch any immediate causes for memory or CPU errors.

For manual overclocks, based on the information gathered from the previous testing, starts off at a nominal voltage and CPU multiplier, and the multiplier is increased until the stability tests are failed. The CPU voltage is increased gradually until the stability tests are passed, and the process repeated until the motherboard reduces the multiplier automatically (due to safety protocol) or the CPU temperature reaches a stupidly high level (105ºC+). Our testbed is not in a case, which should push overclocks higher with fresher (cooler) air.

Overclocking Results

The lack of preset overclocking profiles can be forgiven due to the nature of how well the X570 Aorus Xtreme performs in our overclock testing. The overclocking performance of the GIGABYTE X570 Aorus Xtreme boasts very tight VDroop with the biggest variation from the value set for the CPU VCore in the firmware by a slight overcompensation of just 0.05 at our highest overclock of 4.3 GHz. Even at the lower frequencies ranging from 3.6 GHz all cores, to 4.2 GHz, we experienced a slight margin of variance by around 0.002 V to 0.01 V which is very impressive, to say the least. 

GIGABYTE's biggest win here is that when Precision Boost Overdrive is in the firmware is set from default to enabled, the performance jump in our Pov-Ray testing yielded a massive improvement over stock settings; the score was increased from 4440 to 4701. While this equates to a performance jump of just under 6%, it's still something which other boards we've tested so far on earlier firmware have been able to achieve. Another interesting focal point is the power draw under load at our maximum settings of 4.3 GHz at 1.375 V on the CPU VCore. In comparison to the MSI MEG X570 Godlike which it competes in both spec and pricing, the X570 Aorus Xtreme managed to do this with 24 W of power draw. This shows the efficiency of the power delivery when extra voltage is put through Infineon's new 16-phase XDPE132G5C Digital PWM controller. Overall performance in Pov-Ray increased by a nice margin at each 100 MHz CPU ratio we tested, and we found no anomalies.