Introduction

We're starting to get rumors of another round of CPUs from Intel and combined with price cuts for boards and CPUs already, there are situations where Arrow Lake makes sense, especially if gaming isn't the main priority. Gigabyte's been understandably focusing much of its efforts on AMD, and we've had some fantastic options there in both black and white, but today we're seeing what it has to offer on Intel's current platform with the Z890 Aorus Elite X Ice.

It's received a modest price cut recently, falling from the $280 mark to $240, but has in the last few weeks fallen to just $210. That seems like something of a steal as far as motherboards go given what's listed in the specifications, with a 16+1+2 80 A power phase design, Thunderbolt 4, PCIe Gen 5 GPU and M.2 support, CUDIMM, Wi-Fi 7 and of course Gigabyte's plethora of DIY-friendly features too.



Of course, we need to see how it actually performs and what it's like to live with so in this review we'll be looking at how the Aorus Elite X Ice handles Intel's current flagship CPU—the Core Ultra 9 285K—as well as the latest SSDs. It gets put through its paces in our usual tests to see if the board really is a bargain you can already add to your Christmas list.

Specifications