sure who this is for but it is there if
stickers and such things appeal to you.
If you do, there’s a roughly ATX sized
sheet with plenty of these stickers for
you to use as you see fit.
The real meat and potatoes of
the package however are the OC-touch
Panel and of course the RGB
Commander. I’ll focus on the later as
this one is overwhelmingly a ‘gamer’
and not so much ‘overclocker’
orientated motherboard.
Basically, the RGB Commander is a
software adjustable fan controller at its
core. However, it has some intelligence
that allows it to deal with LED strips
(addressable and non-addressable with
appropriate voltages) and temperature
sensor data. This unit provides support
for up to eight fans, which means over
and above the board fan headers this
unit brings the tally up to a total of 16
fans. Excessive to some but that is
expected on such a premium offering.
What you see in the screenshot
(tiny as they are) is the software which
is used for both the unit and the
motherboard.
Most of the software that ships with
motherboards is optional, but there
are some useful packages and RGB
Fusion is one of the ones you’ll need.
As for the rest of the packaged
goodies, there’s an AOURS branded
USB 3.0 pen drive (replacing the long
overdue DVD) with all the motherboard
software. Do not get too excited though
as it's a 4GiB drive which isn’t enough
for anything other than what’s on
already. I’d have liked to see at least an
8GiB high speed drive for this, if only so
that it’s in line with the rest of the
motherboard and what it is asserting
itself to be. Still, that we have a pen
drive instead of a DVD is progress and
I’ll take it.
UEFI
As with all boards these days, the
UEFI has a number of features and
performance profiles for the user to
use and tune. On the Z390 AORUS
Xtreme, what you have outside of the
OC button is pre-determined settings
for a number of CPU SKUs. Using the
F2 BIOS, the profiles seemed to be only
relevant for 8th generation Intel Core
CPUs (removed with F3 Bios and later).
Odd given that the Z390 chipset was
the accompanying chipset to the 9th
generation Core CPUs. Perhaps this
is left over code from the previous
generation boards.
If for some odd reason you'd not
updated your BIOS, exercise caution
and double check the applied settings
before loading these profiles on your
9600, 9700 or 9900K based system.
Your hardware isn’t in any danger be it
you use these profiles or not, but they
just may apply unnecessarily high
voltages to your system which may lead
to higher operating temperatures.
Outside of that, the UEFI has made a
number of improvements from
the previous GIGABYTE offerings,
including but not limited to a much
faster UEFI update process (literally
this takes seconds), a butter smooth
mouse pointer, direct key in for DRAM
and other frequency related options
and Improved Loadline Calibration
options. Gone is the confusing, AUTO,
Mid-PWR, Medium, Normal, Turbo,
High Performance and Extreme
Performance settings (just to name
a few), instead we have a more sensible
naming scheme with a graphic
illustration to boot. When changing the
settings and saving, the confirmation
Issue 46 | 2019 The OverClocker 31