Gigabyte B850I Aorus Pro Review

Introduction

Gigabyte should be commended on its Mini-ITX support over recent years, especially with its current AMD line-up that includes both white and black models for AMD CPUs, albeit split over two chipsets. The B850I Aorus Pro is the cheaper of the two, yet still includes many features of the more premium X870 model, such as an M.2 SSD cooling fan and double-sided cooling, decent audio, Wi-Fi 7 and full PCIe Gen 5 support.

At $260, it’s also enjoyed limited competition, being more affordable than the admittedly excellent ASUS ROG Strix B850-I Gaming Wi-Fi, offering a more alluring feature set compared to the cheaper still Phantom Gaming B850I Lightning Wi-Fi, furthermore, MSI has been absent from the AMD Mini-ITX scene until relatively recently. Times have changed though, as the ASUS board has seen a recent price hike to nearly $100 more than the B850I Aorus Pro, but MSI has joined the party with the MSI MPG B850I Edge Ti Wi-Fi, which thankfully retails for a similar price.

The great thing about Mini-ITX motherboards is that they often take very different routes to solve the usual issues of cramming in enough features into their tiny PCBs, so anything is possible here. That said, Gigabyte has made some questionable design and layout choices in the past so let’s hope it’s learned some lessons.

Specifications