Aorus B650I ULTRA Gaming Desktop Motherboard - AMD B650 Chipset - Socket AM5 - Mini ITX

This board was almost plug and play. I didn't require the SATA daughterboard, so it was just a matter of installing the CPU and memory, mounting the cooler, installing the rear NVME, and mounting to the case. The entire back of this board acts as a heatsink for a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, so make sure to install that first before putting it in your case.Make sure to update your BIOS to the latest version. This can be done at any time, even after installing Windows. Some CPUs run hot until you update, so don't skip it. This board includes a backup bios, so if you somehow screw up you can restore everything and try again. You can download the BIOS from Gigabyte's website, and you can find your board's version number on the box's sticker or silkscreened in the corner of the board itself.I don't understand the complaints about cable management. Mine's messy, but only because I crammed a SFX PSU (SF1000L) into a Fractal Terra and chose to use its included flat cables instead of ordering shorter customs. You'll be fine. If you're building a Mini-ITX PC in a windowed case and are concerned about aesthetics, then you should know that custom PSU cables are common, if not expected. If in doubt, there are plenty of videos featuring this board on Youtube and the manuals can be downloaded from Gigabyte, so you should be able to plan your route in advance.Boot times are about 35-40 seconds with ultra fast boot enabled, which is slower than I'd hoped. I never had the memory training problem with my G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 64GB 6400MT/s. If you care about enabling XMP/EXPO for your ram, make sure your ram is on the QVL list before you order (Google "B650I AORUS QVL"). This board supports both XMP and EXPO, but better safe than sorry.

Worked out of the box. I did have a couple of critiques about it like the placement of the argb and usb2 headers and the fact that we need to use dongles for fans and the usb header for my aio. Other than that this is a nice board with 3 m.2 slots.

This is my first ITX mobo, but certainly not the first PC I've built. I was shocked at how heavy it was when I first took it out of the box! Part is due to all the cooling around the board and the metal backplate that covers most of the of the back of the board, but it's also 8 layer PCB! So it feels substantial.I love that it has THREE NVME slots. Not many boards do. Since it took me forever to find out where they all are via online manual and product specs on Gigabyte's website, I will tell you here:Slots 1 & 2 are where you expect them to be. Right above the PCI slot. There are heatsinks, thermal tape(?), and a fan. I will say the "tool-less" latch for the top NVME is not at all explained in the manual nor on the website. I found a video on youtube. Basically you press on the long end of the latch and it pops upwards to accommodate the drive.Slot 3 is on the back of the board and requires removing screws in order to take the large metal plate off the back.I saw some reviews complain about the daughter board, the fact that it is needed at all I supposed. But since I'm not putting any SATA drives in this build at all, nor am I using RGB lights, It doesn't matter to me. The daughter board has one 12v RGB controller as well as 4x SATA ports. I might be upset if I used SATA, I don't know.The other thing I'm not too keen on is the whole bluetooth/wifi combo. First, the antenna is hideous! Like some weird cybernetic orca fin. Thankfully it has a long cable so you can hide it if you desire. However, I have this plugged into ethernet so I don't need it. But as I quickly found out, the bluetooth is also piped through the same antenna. So if you need to use BT at all, bear in mind that the signal will be terrible unless you plug it in. Whether you're using WiFi or not. I would much prefer the type of antenna where it's two separate "normal" looking posts, for lack of a better term.

So I've owned 3 different Gigabyte MoBos over the years. All have failed me in some way shape or form. This was the first AMD build I'd ever done, so I was hoping that would change things. NOPE.What is good about it? Plenty of M.3 slots. Pretty decent amount of connection points for a variety of things for such a small board. I enjoy that. That's about where it ended.Building the system was easy. Once I installed everything, including windows, obviously I went right into bios to turn on XMP and make some adjustments. That's where Gigabyte fails. I can't turn anything on without compromising the systems' ability to reboot. I can't reboot the system. I have to shut down every time. I can't enable XMP and reboot. I can't enable quick boot and reboot. I can't make any changes in the bios and reboot, because the system goes into a frozen status where it does nothing at all.Yeah, I looked it up. I bought 3 different pairs of RAM, thinking it was because of RAM incompatibility. Nope. Reinstalled everything. Nope. Pulled the whole system apart, put everything back together. Nope. Updated BIOS. Nope. Flashed bios to a previous version. NOPE. I am not going to send it back because it's been way too long (didn't realize it wasn't rebooting because it's my girlfriends work PC and she uses it for weeks at a time without reboots) so by the time I realized there were problems with it, it was well passed the warranty. Not only that, but Gigabyte is NOTORIOUS for being terrible. Their BIOS is hot trash. Their installed software for mobo control (like RGB Fusion, or any of their programs for fan control or anything else) is a dumpster fire.Avoid.