TweakTown's Rating: 92%
TweakTown award
The Bottom Line
Great value for money and a stunning design make the Z890 AORUS Pro Ice one of relatively few options for a resplendent white themed build.
Pros
Lovely white aesthetic
Affordability
5G LAN and 320MHz Wi-Fi 7
Good cooling
Cons
It's missing that last 1% of ultimate performance
Should you buy it?
AvoidConsiderShortlistBuy
Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing
There's just something about a white motherboard-they're just so clean! A nicely built system with appropriate lighting and partnering components looks pretty darn good. Although white motherboards aren't as rare as they once were, the GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice stands out because it's one of the few with white memory slots, too.
The Z890 AORUS Pro Ice isn't just a beauty, though. It has a quality feature set that does not go overboard on expensive controllers and features. It's a solid mid-range offering, superior to the designs of cheaper boards, but priced far below high-end boards. It will appeal to a wider audience just on that fact alone.
Popular Now: Nintendo Switch 2 release window confirmed by at least six developers
Item Details
Model GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice
CPU Socket LGA 1851
Chipset Intel Z890
CPU Support Intel Core Ultra 200 series
Memory 4x DDR5 DIMM slots, up to 256GB, up to 9500+ MT/s (OC), Non-ECC, Clocked Unbuffered DIMM (CUDIMM)
Expansion slots 3x PCIe x16
Storage 5x M.2, 4x SATA
Ethernet Realtek RTL8126 5G
Wireless & Bluetooth Intel BE200 Wi-Fi 7. Bluetooth 5.4
USB Up to 2x Thunderbolt 4, 1x USB 20Gbps, 2x USB 10Gbps, 6x USB 5Gbps, 8x USB 2.0
Audio Realtek ALC1220
Form Factor ATX
MSRP $339
The Z890 AORUS Pro Ice has a list of features that few will complain about. You get dual Thunderbolt 4, 5G LAN, 320MHz Wi-Fi 7, a solid VRM, a decent USB complement, and five M.2 slots. Short of expensive things like 10G LAN or an M.2 add-in card, it's a board with all the key specs a mainstream user will need.
GIGABYTE set the board's price to a very reasonable $339. That's still expensive by historical standards, but in our new world, it sits in the sweet spot for an enthusiast board while remaining accessible to mainstream users.
Photo of the GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard
Best Deals: GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard
|Country flag|Today|7 days ago|30 days ago|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|Amazon logo||Loading...|Loading...||
|Newegg logo||-|-||
|* Prices last scanned on 12/5/2024 at 9:49 am CST - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission from any sales.|
Packaging, Accessories, and Overview
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 02
VIEW GALLERY - 30 IMAGES
You wouldn't expect a white motherboard to come in a black box, would you? Intel's logos are the only prominent branding on the front of the box.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 03
Our sample copped a few knocks on its way to us. Luckily, the motherboard itself was in perfect condition.
In contrast to the front of the box, the rear is absolutely packed with all the highlighted features and specifications.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 04
The Z890 AORUS Pro Ice comes with a solid list of accessories. The key inclusions are the well-made Wi-Fi antenna and a memory cooling fan. The antenna is a screwless plug-and-play affair with a magnetic base.
You also get two thermistor cables, a fan extension cable, a sound detection cable for use with the onboard lighting, a convenient front cable connector, and two SATA cables. Finally, there is a quick setup guide, regulatory notices, and some AORUS stickers.
The days of CDs and DVDs with drivers and utilities are behind us, and only high-end motherboards come with a bundled flash drive these days. A visit to the AORUS website will give you access to the latest drivers and utilities, or you can rely on the GIGABYTE app, which loads upon entering Windows for the first time.
Motherboard Overview
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 05
If you're after a motherboard for a white-themed build, the Z890 AORUS Pro Ice will be hard to look past. Part of the appeal of white motherboards is their ability to meld with RGB colors from across the spectrum. With that in mind, the Z890 AORUS Pro Ice comes with three ARGB headers and an RGB strip header. There are two integrated RGB sections. The AORUS logo atop the rear I/O is the most prominent, while the 'Team Up Fight On' wording at the bottom right is backlit, too.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 06
No matter how good a motherboard looks, it doesn't mean much if it's not capable, too. The board includes eight 4-pin fan and pump headers, power, reset, and BIOS flashback buttons, a debug LED display, and a noise detection header.
It's interesting to note the inclusion of a board-mounted HDMI 1.4 port. This can be used to connect to a case-mounted screen. It supports resolutions of up to 1920 x 1080 at 30Hz, so it's not suitable for use with a regular monitor, but if you fancy having a small case-mounted display, you could use it to show monitoring information or anything else you can think of. GIGABYTE knows this board will be used in showcase builds.
There are headers for a single Type-C 20Gbps port, two 5Gbps ports, and four USB 2.0 ports.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 07
Four DIMM slots support speeds of DDR5-9500+, with up to 256GB supported. To reach such speeds, you'll need CUDIMMs.
A quick memory test with a CUDIMM kit saw us reach DDR5-9466 with XMP settings. That's not a bad result for a no-tweak test. Generally, you'll get better results with a dual-DIMM board if you want to push a CUDIMM kit towards 10,000 MT/s or beyond, or at least a CPU with a strong memory controller.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 08
The Z890 AORUS Pro Ice comes with a capable 16+1+2 phase VRM with 90A stages. An Arrow Lake processor doesn't need a gazillion phases, and this design is more than enough to handle a water-cooled Core Ultra 9 285K.
I've long been a fan of GIGABYTE's finned heatsink designs, and I was a little sad to see them missing from the Z890 AORUS Pro Ice. However, any fears were completely unfounded, as the board returned a very good peak VRM temperature of 54 degrees Celsius, placing it behind only the OC-focused ASUS Maximus Z890 Apex.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 09
The Z890 AORUS Pro Ice has five PCB-mounted M.2 slots, which is a good number for a mid-range 4-DIMM slot board. The primary M.2 slot supports PCIe 5.0 drives, while the other four support PCIe 4.0. The primary slot has its own dedicated cooling block, while the other four share a single large plate. Credit to GIGABYTE for the design of its retention mechanisms for the drives and heatsinks, which are completely toolless.
Four SATA ports join the five M.2 slots. The board comes with a pair of white SATA cables, so you can preserve that lovely white theme.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 10
The Z890 AORUS Pro Ice features three PCIe slots, all of which are x16 physically. The primary slot is reinforced for heavy graphics cards and runs at PCIe 5.0 electrically. The other two slots are connected to the chipset and support PCIe 4.0 x4 and x1, respectively.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 11
The Z890 AORUS Pro Ice has a solid, if unspectacular, set of rear USB ports. It includes dual Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports with DP support, two 10Gbps ports, four 5Gbps ports, and four USB 2.0 ports. It would be helpful if these were labeled better.
GIGABYTE opted for a commonly used Realtek RTL8126 controller for the 5G LAN port. It's good to see faster Ethernet ports making their way to more affordable models. An Intel BE200 Wi-Fi 7 controller handles Wi-Fi 7 duties. This controller supports 320MHz connections and also provides Bluetooth 5.4 support.
Next are the audio ports, which consist of 3.5mm line-in and line-out ports and S/PDIF. A Realtek ALC1220 codec drives these. It's an older codec, with many makers opting for ALC4080 family chips, but there are some enhancements, including WIMA capacitors.
There aren't any rear-mounted CMOS clear and BIOS flashback buttons. For BIOS flashback, there's a PCB-mounted button, while to clear the CMOS, you'll need to do it the old-fashioned way, via a jumper positioned near the CMOS battery. We'd also like to see a rear-mounted HDMI port.
UEFI, Software and Test System
UEFI
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 12GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 14
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 15GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 16
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 17
GIGABYTE's Aorus-themed BIOSes have remained relatively unchanged in recent years, and the Z890 Pro Ice's layout will remain familiar to anyone who's owned a GIGABYTE board in recent times. All essential settings are easy to find, and the grey theme matches the board's look.
On a semi-related note, anyone who's watched the Person of Interest TV series (very underrated!) might recall the graphics used for the antagonistic Samaritan AI. The Z890 AORUS Pro Ice strongly reminds me of that!
Using the default BIOS that shipped with the board, we were unable to boot at 9400 MT/s with our G.Skill Trident Z Royal CUDIMM test kit; however, an update to the newer F9 BIOS allowed us to reach 9466 MT/s. That's not bad for a four-DIMM board with minimal tweaking. With a properly tuned kit, appropriate voltages, and some help from a good quality IMC, reaching higher than this is a definite possibility.
Test System
Benchmarks - Rendering and Encoding
Cinebench 2024
Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that Intel and AMD have relied on to showcase their newest platforms during unveilings. The benchmark has two tests: a single-core workload that utilizes one thread, or 1T, and a multi-threaded test that uses all threads, or nT, of a tested CPU.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 19
Cinebench shows the Core Ultra 9 285K at its best. The Z890 AORUS Pro Ice was a little behind here, although not by a lot.
Blender
A rendering application like Blender is just one of many reasons a user will consider a high-core-count CPU like a Core Ultra 9 285K. We use the Whitelands demo file and record how long it takes to render the image.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 20
The motherboard makes little difference in our Blender test; the result of 401 seconds is five seconds behind the fastest result. That's not much in percentage terms for a test that takes over six minutes to complete.
Handbrake
Handbrake is a simple-to-use video encoding and transcoding application. Here, we convert a 4K movie trailer to 1080p. The results below show the average FPS, where a higher result means the task will take less time to complete.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 21
The 285K is an excellent chip for rendering and encoding; we see it again here. The AORUS was just behind the ASRock, with the MSI and ASUS dual-DIMM boards a little further ahead. Is that just a coincidence?
Benchmarks - File Compression and Memory latency
7Zip
7Zip is a commonly used free file compression and decompression app. It's influenced by memory speed and latency changes and scales with the number of CPU threads.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 22
A result of 188.31 BIPS in this memory-sensitive benchmark puts the AORUS slightly behind again.
AIDA64 Memory Latency
Memory latency has traditionally favored Intel and its monolithic designs; however, Arrow Lake is far less impressive in that regard. A nanosecond or two here or there is not noticeable, but more significant margins, particularly when the memory is frequently accessed, will result in more undesirable and cumulative idle cycles.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 23
The 285K's memory latency performance is a weak point of the new architecture, but a decent DDR5-7200 kit such as the G.Skill one we use for testing shaves a good 10ns off of what you'd expect from a DDR5-6000 kit. The GIGABYTE challenger brings up the rear again in this test.
Benchmarks - PCMark and 3DMark
PCMark 10 Productivity
We'd love to use our PCs purely for leisure, but some of us have to work, too! The PCMark 10 productivity test performs a series of tests using office productivity applications.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 24
It's a win for the AORUS at last. This is a good result in the PCMark10 productivity benchmark, though the differences aren't significant overall.
3DMark Storage
UL's newest 3DMark SSD Gaming Test is the most comprehensive SSD gaming test ever devised. It is superior to testing against games themselves because, as a trace, it is much more consistent than variations that will occur between runs of the actual game. This test is the same as running the actual game without the inconsistencies inherent in application testing.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 25
The AORUS puts in a solid showing in the 3DMark Storage test.
3DMark Time Spy Extreme
Time Spy Extreme is losing favor as a graphics benchmark in favor of Speed Way and Steel Nomad, but its CPU test is still a good measure of multi-core performance.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 26
The Z890 AORUS Pro Ice is a little slower in the 3DMark CPU test, which follows the trend we've seen throughout the benchmarks so far. However, the differences are not significant in percentage terms.
Benchmarks - Gaming
Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077 is brutal on graphics cards, but when things like ray tracing are removed, it becomes more sensitive to CPU and memory performance differences.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 27
The tested boards all deliver essentially identical results in this GPU-limited game.
Horizon Zero Dawn
When using the 'favor performance' preset, Horizon Zero Dawn can achieve high frame rates with powerful graphics cards.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 28
Here's another gaming result that shows the motherboards are all within a small percentage of one another.
Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition
Metro Exodus received an update that added improved DLSS support, enhanced ray tracing features, and variable rate shading, among other things. Still, with a powerful graphics card, it is affected by CPU and memory performance at 1080p, though less so with a card like the RTX 4070 Ti Super.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 29
The three gaming results show that the motherboard usually makes little difference in gaming performance when all other components and settings are equal.
VRM and SSD Temperatures
These tests are performed to show off the differences between each motherboard's cooling assemblies. In the case of VRM testing, each board is subjected to a 20-minute Cinebench loop, while the SSD test records the peak temperature recorded during the lengthy 3DMark Storage test.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 30
This is a good result for the AORUS. It manages to beat boards that cost much more, if only by a few degrees. A fully loaded Core Ultra 9 285K presents the Z890 AORUS Pro Ice with no challenge.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 31
The AORUS features a good-quality heatsink, and it shows here. It's not all about surface area. The retention mechanism is very good. Trying to give it a little wiggle when attached shows that the contact between the heatsink and SSD is tight and rigid.
Final Thoughts
When considering a motherboard purchase, the essential criteria carry different weights for different people. Price, features, aesthetics, and performance all factor into a purchase decision.
In terms of price, the GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice offers good value - relative to other motherboards, at least. While $339 is a lot to pay for a motherboard in historical terms, compared to the white-themed ASUS ROG Strix Z890-A at $399 or MSI MPG Edge Ti at $369, it's very competitively priced.
You get dual Thunderbolt 4, 5G LAN, 320MHz Wi-Fi 7, support for up to five M.2 SSDs, and a VRM capable of powering a heavily overclocked Core Ultra 9 CPU. Short of things like 10G LAN, an LCD, or an M.2 expansion card, there isn't much more you can reasonably expect without being forced to pay a lot more.
GIGABYTE Z890 AORUS Pro Ice Motherboard Review - A gorgeous board at a reasonable price 32
So, with good value and an impressive feature set, we come to aesthetics, and on that topic, GIGABYTE hit it out of the park. It's a gorgeous board. The inherent look of a white motherboard leaves you free to choose any RGB color theme you wish to name. I like a bit of Evangelion style purple with some green elements. Popping the Z890 AORUS Pro Ice into a white case with those colors that would look lovely indeed. Do you like blue? Or yellow? This is a board that will blend in with any theme.
It's not all perfect, though. The performance of the board typically fell towards the rear of the four boards we've tested to date. The differences are not problematic, and a couple of seconds here or there or the loss of 1% of FPS is insignificant, but it's better to lead the pack rather than trail it. With all the talk of underwhelming Arrow Lake performance, it's likely upcoming microcode tweaks and a month or two of BIOS updates will shake up the order, and all boards will eventually perform within a margin of error.
The Z890 AORUS Pro Ice is a board that offers value for money, a solid feature set, and, above all, a lovely design. With those three boxes ticked, it's easy to recommend it.