The motherboard is the heart of your PC, the nexus into which everything else connects. Using a good quality motherboard is important for any gaming PC build, as choosing second best can lead to lower framerates and less expansion capability.
For AMD’s AM5 processors, such as the latest 9000-series chips including the mighty Ryzen 7 9800X3D, that means the X870 chipset, and the X870E AORUS Master is GIGABYTE’s top-end ATX board, offering the best power and thermal design alongside exceptionally fast PCIe 5.0 and USB4 connectivity.
The X870E AORUS Master is built to be powerful, yet also to run at surprisingly low temperatures. It manages this by designing thermal management into the board at every level. The VRM—the voltage regulator module that helps guide the right amount of power to critical systems such as the CPU and RAM—is enveloped in GIGABYTE’s advanced Thermal Armor system. This uses heatpipes and a thermal pad to prevent this important corner of the motherboard from getting too hot, despite the large amounts of power that pass through it every time you switch your PC on. The IO shield is integrated into the cooling system, so you won’t have to find it in the box and fiddle around installing it the right way up.
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Taming the beasts
Your PC’s SSDs can get hot too, especially if they’re the cutting-edge PCIe 5.0 drives supported by the X870E AORUS Master. The motherboard comes with a heatsink that will dissipate the heat they produce, helping to prevent them slowing down as they reach the point of thermal throttling. Earlier generations of M.2 SSDs didn’t need this additional cooling, but if you want the fastest in 2025 you need to take temperature into account. Three of the X870E AORUS Master’s M.2 slots support PCIe 5.0 x4 speeds, with the fourth still speedy at PCIe 4.0 x4, meaning you can fill a PC with a lot of fast storage by taking advantage of all these possibilities.
With all this heat being pumped into the air inside the case, you’ll need to supply fresh air through the use of case fans. The X870E AORUS Master offers a total of eight PWM fan headers, giving you endless intake and exhaust options alongside your choice of CPU cooler, all software controlled so that they only spin up to their full power when they need to, keeping the system quiet while under a reduced load. While you’re plugging things in, there are four aRGB Gen 2 headers and a four-pin light strip socket, to really make your PC your own with a unique look.
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The greatest graphics
A top-end motherboard deserves a similarly premium GPU, and GIGABYTE has you covered with its Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC 16G. With 16 GB of VRAM on a 256bit interface, these cards offer a huge boost in raw performance over the previous generation, and bring with them improvements in AI calculations and ray-tracing too.
All this rendering power requires cooling that can keep up, and GIGABYTE’s Windforce system combines three of GIGABYTE’s innovative Hawk fans capable of spinning in alternate directions to reduce turbulence and increase airflow. The fan blades have been designed taking inspiration from the aerodynamic shape of an eagle’s wing, shaped to reduce air resistance and noise levels, and capable of a 12.5% increase in air volume without extra noise. Inside the fan is graphene nano lubricant, which eases the passage of the fan blades through the casing and can extend the life of the fan by 2.1 times over less sophisticated bearings. It’s quieter too.
Added to this futuristic engineering are heatpipes, a large copper plate in contact with the GPU itself, and topped off with server-grade thermal conductive gel to get temperatures under control. The card is capable of utilising a dual BIOS structure so that it can easily switch between Performance and Silent modes, using less power and needing less cooling—it can even turn its fans off completely when you’re not asking it to create fantastic graphics at phenomenal frame rates.
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Build the future
The X870E AORUS Master and Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC 16G help make building your own PC easier than ever with their innovative building features. The graphics card slips home in the top PCIe slot easily thanks to EZ-Latch Plus with no screws to do up, while there are magnetic attachments in place for the SSD heatsink (EZ-Match) while the drives themselves which pop up at the press of a button and also have a fully screwless design. Even the WI-Fi 7 antennas connect easily to the terminals on the IO shield, with no fiddling or screwing required.
GIGABYTE’s supremely well designed motherboards for the latest generation of PC components are the premier choice for high-end AMD PC builds with X3D processors. Combine one with GIGABYTE’s Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC 16G graphics card, and you have the basis of a system that will provide the highest frame rates and visual clarity in your games.