Gigabyte Z590 AORUS Xtreme Motherboard Revealed

Courtesy of VideoCardz, we have an early look at the upcoming Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Xtreme motherboard that will launch next week, purportedly alongside Intel's new 11th-Gen Rocket Lake CPUs. We expect to see the full details of Gigabyte's Z590 Aorus Xtreme next week during CES 2021.

The new motherboard apparently features several major upgrades, the most significant being the power delivery system. Gigabyte's previous Z490 Aorus Xtreme already had a great power delivery system with 17 phases (16+1 design). This was more than sufficient for overclocking Comet Lake-S CPUs. However, in light of Intel's recent strategy to push sub-ambient cooling to the masses, more power delivery might be needed. Gigabyte apparently increased the Z590's power phases to 21 (20+1 design) to combat the extra power consumption Intel's CPUs can eat up when cooling is no longer a bottleneck.

According to the report, the Z590 Xtreme gets a bandwidth jump from three M.2 PCIe Gen 3.0 slots to two M.2 PCIe Gen 4.0 slots and a third Gen 3.0 slot. This goes in line with Rocket Lake being the first CPU architecture from Intel to support the PCIe Gen 4.0 standard fully.

According to Videocardz, Gigabyte's Z590 Aorus Xtreme will pack a yet-unannounced audio codec from Realtek, the ALC4080. We don't know anything about this chip, but it seems to be a successor to the current ALC1220 codec. Basically, this means that the Z590 Xtreme will pack better audio processing compared to previous Z490 boards.

Hopefully, we'll know more about this motherboard at CES 2021. We expect this motherboard to release alongside Intel's Rocket Lake processors in the next few months.