GIGABYTE X870I AORUS PRO ICE AMD AM5 LGA 1718 Motherboard, Mini-ITX, DDR5, 2X M.2, PCIe 5.0, USB-C, WIFI7, 2.5GbE LAN, EZ-Latch, 5-Year Warranty

Used this board to build a white themed SFF build. Practicality the only white X870 itx motherboard out right now. Have had it for around a month running a 9800X3D with 32GB of ram at 6400mhz.Everything is great so far. My system runs great, and looks amazing. But it needed multiple bios updates, as it looked like my board came with a pre-release bios of some sort. I do have some minor complaints though.-No onboard RGB lighting, only RGB headers for other products. Though some people would consider this a win.-VRMs run pretty warm without dedicated airflow over the heatsink. You would think that for $300 Gigabyte would engineer a better solution for the VRMs and chipset. I bought a cooper M.2 heatsink and plunked it on the side of the flat part of the heatsink above the VRMs (next to the CPU) with some thermal tape, just for some peace of mind. Makes it look prettier at least, lol.-The SSD fan runs at max speed by default, and is loud by nature. Definitely tune it down in BIOS when setting up.-No optical out audio, a standard audio port that has been included in virtually any other device for decades. Not really a big deal in the real world, but I don't get why they didn't include it. There is clearly room on the back of the board, and cost-savings on this board shouldn't be a concern for Gigabyte.-No built-in temperature probe headers for adding thermal sensors around your system. This means that if you decide to watercool your system, like I did, you'll have to rely on traditional thermal sensors on the board instead to control pumps and fans. Which means you are gonna need to take some extra time and patience to tune your cooling setup for your noise to performance preference. On my other water-cooled builds, I used fittings with embedded thermal sensors monitoring coolant temperature to control all my fans/pumps. Every one of them was dead silent for that reason.Again for $300, I would expect for Gigabyte to spare the extra few cents in manufacturing for a two-pin header that literally exists on their other boards from previous generations. Why they forgot to include at least one, in an expensive enthusiast motherboard, is beyond me. I got around this in my build by controlling everything with the VRM's temperature.Solid and stable motherboard overall. It's pricey though, and there is not much to differentiate it from B850 boards to justify a $300 price tag, in my opinion.

It’s just a little more than the B850i version but added the X870 chipset and includes a second usbc port. It was worth the extra $20 to me. On top of it it is the white version so you are not just paying extra for it to be white so I liked that.I don’t like the placement of the audio port for the front panel audio. It gets in the way and makes it hard to cleanly route that cable.I do really like the easy latch for the ssd on the front of the board but the fan on it is absolutely horrible with the default fan curve. Use a fan control software to adjust it so it’s bearable and you don’t have to worry about the issue.The quick release button for the GPU pcie slot is so amazing. It works great and it’s a feature I hope to see in future boards.

Still debating returning. The WiFi antenna connection is stupidly proprietary and I don't like the wired dongle antenna they've included... but I'm not about to spend $40 on their replacement. The drivers in Linux are also not in most distros yet, even the unstable branches, so you have to manually upgrade to a much more cutting edge kernel to get e.g. LAN support. The SSD heat sink fan makes a very obnoxious noise and I'll probably have to replace it.Gen5 SSDs are indeed crazy fast and I love how fast stuff launches but I think I'd been happier with another vendor's x870i or maybe even just a b850i/b650i.

Easy build, everything has been working fine, first time building a sffpc and felt pretty easy. Recommended.

Difficult to install, wifi adapter failed new out of the box, lacking clear instructions, returned and switched back to Asus.

The coil whine (sound) this board emits is terrible, its actually louder than the CPU fan at full load. To make matters worse, its an annoying buzzing sound, subjectively worse than the sound of small fans at high RPM.Some similar Asus AMD boards have the same problem, do your research before purchasing.I'm only knocking off 1 star, because its an otherwise good board.

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They give you crappy instructions and expect you to know to go on website to look for actual manual