THE B650E AORUS TACHYON

Once again GIGABYTE has chosen a black and light grey color theme for their latest motherboard.

The 16+4 phase digital VRM is cooled by a large L-shaped aluminum heatsink (the tantalum capacitors are also visible).

Two 8pin CPU power connectors are required much like most high-end motherboard models.

Since the B650E AORUS TACHYON target audience are overclockers and enthusiasts GIGABYTE chose to go with 2 reinforced DIMM slots with supported speeds exceeding 6666MHz (better performance and higher stability).

Next to the DIMM slots we find two switches (reserved and BIOS) and an angled 24pin motherboard power connector (also reinforced).

Further down we find a USB port (probably for BIOS updates) and an angled front USB connector.

On the lower right corner, we find the debug LED indicator and the power on/off and the CPU clock up/down buttons.

Further to the left GIGABYTE has placed the reset, LIMP mode, cold reset and clear CMOS buttons and the OC trigger switch.

As mentioned earlier the B650E AORUS TACHYON features two reinforced PCIe slots, one 5.0 x16 and one 4.0 x4.

There are two heatsinks here which when removed reveal 3 M.2 slots, 2 PCIe 5.0 (complete with thermal pads) and 1 PCIe 4.0.

Thanks to the EZ-Latch Plus design the M.2 SSDs connect effortlessly without the need of screws.

The Realtek ALC1220-VB High Definition Audio onboard audio card is paired with high-quality capacitors located on the lower left corner.

At the rear I/O we find the q-flash plus and OC ignition buttons, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, two SMA antenna ports, HDMI v2.1 port, Intel 2.5G LAN port, 3 USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, 4 USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, 1 USB 3.2 Gen2x2 type-C port and the optical out and analog audio ports.

Unfortunately, GIGABYTE hasn't placed an aluminum protection/reinforcement plate on the other side of the motherboard (for this model i was hoping that would be the case).

Just like with my ASRock X670E Taichi review I’ll be testing the B650E AORUS TACHYON with the GSkill Trident Z5 Neo 32GB 6000MHz CL30 EXPO kit, the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and the Neo Forza NFP425 1TB SSD.

So, time to test and see what the B650E AORUS TACHYON by GIGABYTE is capable of.