It’s Better Than Bad, It’s … Wood?

Gigabyte has released a unique X870E board they call the AERO X3D WOOD.  That name could lead you to worry this presages a creative way to avoid the PCB shortages we are just beginning to experience, and that overclocking would start to share some similarities with wood burning.  Thankfully that is not the case, the AERO X3D WOOD uses an 8-layer PCB with inlaid copper and a hefty backplate.  You won’t have to worry the 60 amp 16+2+2 power delivery is going to set your wooden motherboard on fire, though you should definitely still worry about any burning smells!

Instead Gigabyte is using the wood for a bit of flair on the I/O panel and the secondary M.2 heatsink, along with some leather pull tabs on the M.2 slots to make removing drives easier.  You might also notice that those wood highlights are suspiciously not very wooden looking, you would be right as they are actually wood-grained composite material and are not in danger of combusting the same way real wood would.  

Apart from the quality of the wood, the rest of the AERO X3D WOOD is solid and incorporates what Gigabyte have learned from their first generation of X870E motherboards.  You can read the full log of The FPS Review’s experiences with the board here.