GIGABYTE B760I AORUS PRO DDR4 Motherboard

Picked this up as a returned item for the low. Had no issues updating Bios for 14th gen and my i5 is handling my windows docker server great DDR5 ram 2.5 gig Ethernet and very small form factor all’s great quality… the M2 heat shield is also really nice the smaller the board the harder it was to work on but turned out pretty clean.

Of course that leads to some difficulties, such as reaching some of the connectors and screws. Also, the 2nd M2. nvme connector is on the back side, and is covered by a backplate/heatsink. Any sloppy moves while aligning that thing to be screwed back on can cause the protective / heat conductive film to be mangled.
The final result is a very nice well-performing system. The onboard intel i225-V ethernet chip works fine @ 2.5GHz under Freebsd 13.1. Didn’t try the WIFI. The provided wifi depends on the board revision. See the Gigabyte manual.
One problem was the Amazon fulfillment: they first sent me a board that had been opened and fiddled with. So watch out. I returned it without trying it. The 2nd one was fine.

It has caveats like the rest:

-Your cables will overlap all the pretty LED’s that BTW don’t work without GCC software and will not allow for temperature monitoring. They are mostly useless bells and whistles that drive up the price.

-The I/O heat sink is very large and protruding. It will cause clearance issues with many coolers.

The rear backplate has a useless “heatsink” that covers the rear M.2 slot thus preventing access from the rear cut out in most computer cases. Best thing to do is unscrew it and cut the section out. (-10 points for design lab)

Gigabyte design lab is a bad lab.
GCC software is bug riddled haven. I used it for drivers and uninstalled immediately.

I “upgraded” from gigabytes z590i vision D creator series which was a beautiful thing but 11th gen was an utter joke. B760i aorus pro is 10 steps backwards in some ways, 10 steps forward in other ways…

Ultimately it’s all systems go and I had zero hardware issues. (just clearance issues)
Best for the budget if gen 5/gen 4 features and itx are important to you.
(if you don’t use a gpu with it, it will hit 14,000 read/write speeds via gen 5 nvme slotted into pcie 5.0)

I use the internal usb c header+adapter for a 3rd nvme limited to 10gb/s transfer speeds. Basically a portable drive that is fixed inside the case semi-permanently.

On the note of transfer speeds –
The back io thunderbolt 4/usb-c 3.2 also only reaches 10gb/s. where as other brands in the $400 realm allow for up to x2 thunderbolt 4/usb-c 3.2 ports at 40gb/s transfer speeds.

This is much better than a B660 ITX DDR5 board I recently installed from a company whose name rhymes with MASUS. The pictures are confusing but this baord actually accomodates 1 NVME on the front and one on the back. Both are outfitted with impressive heatsinks that do a fantastic job of keeping the NVMEs cool. On the other board I had, I had to buy a custom heatsink to keep NVME temps down as their heatsink was inadequate. Also for my 2nd drive on that board I had to buy a heatsink too. Gigabyte includes a huge backplate as a heatsink for the 2nd NVME on this board.
First thing I did was go into bios and update bios to latest version from usb drive.
Like other ITX boards, when you install Windows it will not find wifi drivers. For me the easiest way to solve this was to copy the drivers onto a USB using another computer and then at the OOBE screen press CTRL+SHIFT+F3 to reboot into Audit mode. This boots into the built in administrator mode and allows you to install drivers. Once I got the wifi driver on, I rebooted back into OOBE mode using the Sysprep tool. Everything I am describing you can easily find more detailed instructions for by googling the terms I am using.
After that, installed all the drivers from gigabyte website and everything perfect in device manager.
I am using this in an NR200 case with 13400 and Deepcool heatsink for CPU. I have an NVidia 1650 installed mainly using it for work. Ran some games on it, no temperareture issues at all. I am not installing the gigabyte control center as I have seen poor reviews of it.
I am super happy with this hardware so far. This computer is a champ for medical imaging work.

7/31/24: I am lowering my review by 1 star as I used this board in a case that comes with a PCIe3.0 riser cable. There is no option in the BIOS to change the graphics card PCIe speed independent of the m2 nvme sata speed in the slot next to the CPU. There is only one option for both to lower the speed to gen3. So unfortunately this halves the throughput of a gen4 nvme ssd. lowering the graphics card to gen3 has almost no discernible effect even when using the highest end GPU. Asus BIOS does let you set the PCIEx16 speed for the graphics card independent of the m2a SATA speed. I have reached out to gigabyte support requesting them to add this feature for the many people who would use this board in a SFF case with riser cable and not wanting to spend the big bucks for a pcie 4.0 riser cable.

I used this motherboard to do my first mini itx build. Everything went pretty smooth and I really liked the bios flash button, 3 case fan plugs and the 2 m.2 slots on the motherboard. I paired this motherboard with an Intel i7 14700k and had no trouble updating the bios with the flash bios USB port. The motherboard box also came with adapters to help utilize the 2 fan ports on the top right of the board. If you want to add more than 4 fans and one CPU pump/cooler you’ll definitely need some fan spliters. The only Issue I had was with my front panel switches which aren’t labeled on the MB where they go. You’ll have to go online and find the manual to know how you switch should be connected. I would recommend this motherboard worked out for me and the bios is very easy to navigate.