However, with this sandwiched between the GPU and CPU socket, the stock configuration saw an M.2 temperature of over 70☌, which is worse than using the included heatsink with our SSD. The obvious aesthetic tweaks, though, are the addition of an I/O shroud and one M.2 heatsink - welcome if you're not too enamoured of the hefty copper heatsink on SSDs such as the Aorus PCIe 4.0 sample we use for testing. Well, the board doesn't look too dissimilar to the MSI, and while both use exposed chipset fans, the blades here are slightly less prone to damage and finger-mincing while also remaining inaudible above the rest of our hardware during benchmarking, at least using the latest F4j BIOS. As usual, MSI and Gigabyte have taken very different approaches when it comes to shedding some weight to cut price tags, so with the X570 Gaming X retailing for a little more than the MSI board at £183, it's time to find out what Gigabyte's take on an affordable X570 board looks like.
We'd also have concerns its cooling and power circuitry weren't fully up to the task of dealing with heavy overclocking or lengthy high-load tasks with AMD's 12- and 16-core AM4 CPUs.
The MSI X570-A Pro we looked at recently looked rather skinny, lacked M.2 heatsinks, and had a couple of design niggles. While it's great to see X570 boards retailing for more affordable prices, they aren't doing so without compromises.