The MadShrimps crew spend quite some good times with the AORUS Z270X Gaming 7, testing all Kaby Lake desktop processors and a huge quantity of DDR4 memory on it. The Gaming 7 withstood all of our stress tests without a single hiccup, after ironing out some performance issues (with the non-K models) with the Gigabyte BIOS team, allowed these Kaby Lake processors to run as good as on other motherboard solutions. Pretty logic you would say for a 240 euro motherboard! Well over the years as a reviewer and OCer we have seen boards struggling with all sorts of memory, producing weird BIOS issues,... Talk to technicians that assemble PCs in a shop, you might not even be ready to handle the truth.

The layout of the AORUS Gaming 7 is well organized, a clean CPU area, enough spacing between the PCIe slots for multi GPU configurations,...  This Gaming 7 board is feature rich and will satisfy the needs for a wide variety of end users. If RGB options and settings are high on your priority list, this AORUs board has got you covered for sure. Bundling forces with memory giant Corsair for RGB Fusion might be another decent selling point.

Connection wise the doubled LAN ports, one of which is Killer NIC based and the other one is the Intel GbE one. The latter always works and doesn't need any software tinkering to get good performance. After all these years I'm still not convinced about justifying the added costs of these Killer chips, but it is again one of them ticks in the box that most brands still opt for, nobody wants to be left behind...

Sound wise the AORUS Gaming 7 also deviates from the mainstream ALC solutions found on them cheaper boards. The far more powerful Creative on-board chip might not be the wet dream of audiophiles but it is a very solid solution.

Storage options are great too with dual M.2 slots, supporting various lengths. Too bad no extra cooling solution is provided as we spot with some other brands. The U.2 connection might be a tad overkill as hardly any gamer will  opt to install these over standard SSDs or M.2 ones.

The AORUS Gaming 7 is a feature rich board, on some parts maybe even overkill for casual gamers. Best of all is that one doesn't need to pay a premium prize for all this luxury. Performance is good and on par with most Z270 based motherboards. The numerous RGB options and the RGBW light strip header are a plus for those that want to go for full customization. The total of 8 Fan headers will be applauded by many cooling purists. The storage solutions are great and future proof. To sum it up if one opts to buy a high end motherboard to be the foundation of your new gaming rig, check out these AORUS solutions.

PROS:

• Dual M.2 slots
• Triple graphic card support
• RGB options & RGBW light strip header
• Creative sound chip
• Simplified Bios
• Memory compatibility
  

CONS:

• No added M.2 cooling

Thanks to Bernice and Gina for the Gaming 7 motherboard sample.