Is this the best Z690 mini-ITX motherboard for small gaming PCs?
The most interesting part of the board is the stacked M.2 and audio circuits and heatsinks below the CPU socket. The The large heatsink on top makes direct contact with the first of two M.2 ports, which is cooled from the underside too, with the lower port actually facing downwards and the SSD cooled by a thermal pad and heatsink at the bottom.The top slot kept a speedy PCI-E 4.0 SSD at 51°C under a 10 minute load test so is plenty cool enough.
under full load drawing 339W for the system as a whole, so there's plenty of thermal headroom there if you're running at stock speed and being a Z690 board you can easily overclock K-series processors too.Interestingly, Gigabyte has cut the number of SATA ports from the usual four to just two, but seeing as most mini-ITX cases can only house a couple of storage devices anyway, this likely won't be a deal breaker for many potential owners.
It looks pretty good and is $100 cheaper than the Asus board too, albeit without Thunderbolt 4, which is arguably something most Z690 motherboards should include and can be useful, and lacking two SATA ports. If you can stomach those, the Gigabyte Z690I Aorus Ultra Plus is a great buy for a mini gaming rig if $300 is your limit.
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