Overclocking

We set our vcore to a manual voltage of 1.425V, which is the highest we'd apply for a 24/7 overclock given AMD states that 1.45V and above is only safe for temporary benchmarking. 4.25GHz is usually guaranteed with our Ryzen 7 2700X, but we have had one or two examples reaching higher than this. Thankfully, despite its relatively low price tag, the X470 Aorus Ultra Gaming hit 4.25GHz across all cores with ease, so you'll be losing little compared to more expensive boards if you want to apply a reasonable overclock. There are also controls for Precision Boost Overdrive in the EFI if you want to push those stock speed boost frequencies even higher. You can see an in-depth look at Gigabyte's EFI and software here.

Performance Analysis

There are rarely any large performance between boards these days except in areas such as audio performance, and in pretty much all these tests there was little or no difference between the X470 Aorus Ultra Gaming and the rest of the field. The same was true for the storage speeds, and on that note, the M.2 heatsink resulted in a delta T of 34°C under load, which is again on par with the likes of the X470 Aorus Gaming 7 WiFi but not as good as the 19°C managed by the MSI X470 Gaming M7 AC's monstrous M.2 heatsink.

Audio performance was excellent too, with the lowest THD on test, and while the dynamic range and noise levels were at the bottom of the graphs, it would be impossible to tell the difference between it and the top spots in the real world. Power consumption was much lower than the Aorus X470 Gaming 7 WiFi, so we're maybe assuming the latter was a glitch with the early EFI we used - things are much more conservative and in line with the rest of the field here. That said, once overclocked, the board did see the highest load power draw of any X470 board we've tested so far, with the MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon AC drawing a significant 38W less here.

Conclusion

The X470 Aorus Ultra Gaming isn't without its faults, but thankfully these are minor. The lower M.2 slot's bandwidth and lack of SATA support is the main fly in the ointment, so you'll need to make sure you use the top slot if you want to use a SATA M.2 SSD or a modern PCIe NVMe SSD. Overclocked load power consumption was a little high too, but apart from these two issues, we're looking at a board that has more features than some boards costing £50 more, such as its eight fan headers and USB 3.1 support both at the back panel and on the board itself. It even has top-notch audio and the full complement of audio ports, unlike many of the cheaper options out there. As such, at under £130 this is a great buy.