GIGABYTE B850 AORUS ELITE WIFI7 ICE Motherboard Review

TweakTown Rating: 90%

Our Verdict

Given its solid price point and stunning looks, the B850 AORUS STEALTH WIFI7 ICE will earn plenty of well-deserved attention.

Pros

• Lovely white aesthetic
• Affordability
• Lots of USB ports
• Good cooling

Cons

• No USB4
• 3x M.2 may be limiting
• Dated audio codec

Should you buy it?

AvoidConsiderShortlistBuy

Buy at Amazon for $277.99 USD

Buy at Amazon for $409.99 CAD

Buy at Amazon for £254.36

Buy at PC Case Gear for $429 AUD

As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. TweakTown may also earn commissions from other affiliate partners at no extra cost to you.

Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

What is it about white motherboards? They just have an innate clean look. A build with clean cable management and suitable partnering components can look really good. GIGABYTE, in particular, has been pushing white motherboards via its ICE range. GIGABYTE goes a step further by using white memory and PCIe slots, which are reportedly not easy to incorporate.

But a board has to do more than look good. The GIGABYTE B850 AORUS ELITE WIFI7 ICE is built as an affordable mid-range option that doesn't go all-out on expense-adding controllers and features. With its lovely aesthetic and affordable price, it should be a popular option for buyers looking for a white build.

The B850 AORUS ELITE WIFI7 ICE has a reasonable, if unspectacular, set of features for its price. You get WiFi 7 and 2.5G LAN, a solid VRM, many USB ports, and three M.2 slots. USB4 is absent, and some will consider three M.2 slots a bit limiting. There are four SATA ports, so most users will be catered to.

The B850 AORUS ELITE WIFI7 ICE is reasonably priced at $239. At that price, lots of bells and whistles are not expected.

Best Deals: GIGABYTE B850 AORUS ELITE WIFI7 ICE Motherboard

	Today	7 days ago	30 days ago
	$277.99 USD	$277.99 USD	-	Buy
	$409.99 CAD	$409.99 CAD	-	Buy
	£254.36	£232.93	-	Buy
	$277.99 USD	$277.99 USD	-	Buy
	$429 AUD	$429 AUD	-	Buy
* Prices last scanned on 6/15/2025 at 7:18 am CDT - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission from any sales.

Packaging, Accessories, and Overview

25

The B850 AORUS ELITE ICE is a white motherboard, so obviously, it'll come in a white box. There isn't much to show off here, with the AMD B850 logo being the most prominent branding.

25

The rear of the box shows off all of the board's key features and specifications.

25

The B850 AORUS ELITE ICE comes with a decent set of accessories. The WiFi antenna is a screwless plug-in affair with a magnetic base. You also get two SATA cables, some M.2 odds and ends, a case header connector, an AORUS sticker, and some documentation.

You can access the latest drivers and utilities by visiting the AORUS website or relying on the GIGABYTE app, which loads upon entering Windows for the first time.

Motherboard Overview

25

If you're looking for an affordable motherboard for a white-themed AMD build, the B850 AORUS ELITE ICE will be hard to pass up. Though everyone's tastes are different, the design's blend of white and metallic highlights looks really good.

GIGABYTE tells us that it's not easy to just slap white memory and PCIe slots onto a white PCB because the soldering process can stain the PCB. It took some tweaks to the normal motherboard assembly process to make it work.

Love it or loathe it, RGB is here to stay, and the B850 AORUS ELITE ICE comes with three ARGB headers and an RGB strip header. There's just one small integrated RGB section, which is located underneath the chipset heatsink, next to the BIOS battery.

25

Alongside the standard case connector headers, the B850 AORUS ELITE ICE includes a good set of internal headers and buttons. You get six 4-pin fan headers and a decent USB complement consisting of up to four USB 2.0 ports, two 5Gbps ports, and a Type-C 20Gbps port.

Power and reset buttons and a single HDMI port, which can be used for an internal monitor, are less expected, though welcome, at this price point.

25

The board's four DIMM slots support speeds of up to DDR5-8200+, with up to 256GB supported. Of course, you won't be able to run 256GB at those speeds. Even with a more worldly 32GB or 64GB of RAM, DDR5-6000 to 6400 remains the sweet spot for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors.

25

The B850 AORUS ELITE ICE includes three M.2 slots, one of which supports PCIe 5.0. The other two run at PCIe 4.0 speeds. A single plate cools all three. Three slots may be considered limiting by some, but they should be enough for consumer-class systems. Four SATA ports allow for a maximum capacity of seven drives.

There are three PCIe expansion slots. The topmost one supports PCIe 5.0 x16 devices, while the other two x16 slots are limited to PCIe 3.0 speeds and run at just x1 electrically. That's pretty barebones by modern standards. The primary PCIe slot includes GIGABYTE's EZ-Latch quick-release mechanism, which works well in practice.

25

It's a little surprising to see GIGABYTE placed the primary M.2 slot right underneath the primary PCIe slot, which means it's prone to absorbing heat from a graphics card. Thankfully, the heatsink has a large surface area, lessening the heating effect. However, it's still essential to ensure you have good case airflow, as with zero-fan cards, there can be quite a lot of heat generated in this area unless it is effectively removed. I'd consider turning the GPU fans on to move some air when the GPU is idling.

25

The B850 AORUS ELITE ICE features an adequate VRM for a board in this price range. A Ryzen 9 9950X or 9950X3D is not overly demanding, and a 14+2+2 phase design is sufficient for such chips with PBO enabled. Users will find their CPU cooling is a limiting factor when overclocking, not the board.

The board's heatsinks are effective and have a good surface area. Again, we aren't dealing with a board designed for liquid nitrogen overclocking. With a rear case fan adjacent to the VRM heatsinks, cooling won't be a problem, even with a higher TDP CPU.

25

The B850 AORUS ELITE ICE's rear I/O panel is well-equipped. The USB complement includes twelve ports: a single 10Gbps Type-C port, two 10Gbps Type-A ports, five 5Gbps ports, and four USB 2.0 ports.

A Realtek RTL8125D controls the single 2.5G LAN port, while a Realtek RTL8922AE controller handles WiFi 7 duties. Note that this controller is limited to 160MHz connections, not 320MHz like some boards.

Next are the audio ports, which consist of 3.5mm line-in and line-out ports and S/PDIF. GIGABYTE chose the cheaper option here, opting for an aging ALC897 codec.

Finally, there's a single DisplayPort and a BIOS flashback button. The latter means installing a future CPU without updating the BIOS with a currently available chip is possible.

Test System

Test System

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X - Buy from Amazon
• GPU: MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X - Buy from Amazon
• RAM: G.Skill Trident Z Neo RGB 2x16GB DDR5-6000 CL30 - Buy from Amazon
• Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL360 Flux - Buy from Amazon
• OS Storage: Teamgroup T-Force Z540 2TB - Buy from Amazon
• Power Supply: Super Flower Leadex Titanium 850W - Buy from Amazon
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro - Buy from Amazon

Benchmarks - Rendering and Encoding

Cinebench 2024

Cinebench 2024 is the latest version of Maxon's reliable and frequently used benchmark that measures single and multi-threaded performance. Note that all our benchmark testing used the latest available Windows updates and a BIOS that includes AGESA 1.2.0.2, which features improved inter-core latency for AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors.

25

The B850 AORUS ELITE ICE landed right where we expected it to, with a result of 2,273 in the nT test and 137 in the 1T test.

Blender

A rendering application like Blender is just one of many reasons a user will consider a high-core-count CPU like a Ryzen 9 9950X. We use the Whitelands demo file and record how long it takes to render the image.

25

A result of 434 seconds is only a tiny fraction slower than the fastest boards. The motherboard makes little difference in this CPU-dominated benchmark.

Handbrake

Handbrake is a simple-to-use video encoding and transcoding application. Here, we convert a 4K movie trailer to 1080p. The results below show the average FPS, where a higher result means the task will take less time to complete.

25

The B850 AORUS ELITE ICE is in the middle of the pack, with an average FPS of 158.2 seconds.

Benchmarks - File Compression and Memory latency

7Zip

7Zip is a commonly used free file compression and decompression app. It's susceptible to memory speed and latency changes and scales with the number of CPU threads.

25

A result of 224.65 BIPS in this memory-sensitive benchmark puts the AORUS right in the middle of the pack.

AIDA64 Memory Latency

Memory latency is an area that currently favors Intel. AMD's chiplet architecture and the Infinity Fabric link inevitably add some latency compared to Intel's monolithic chips. The real-world benefits aren't that important, though.

25

A result of 71 nanoseconds flat is good. Your results will vary depending on the memory kit used.

Benchmarks - PCMark and 3DMark

PCMark 10 Productivity

We'd love to use our PCs purely for leisure, but some of us have to work, too! The PCMark 10 productivity test performs a series of tests using office productivity applications.

25

All the AM5 boards are close enough to each other, but still, the AORUS ELITE ICE puts in a good showing.

3DMark Storage

UL's newest 3DMark SSD Gaming Test is the most comprehensive SSD gaming test ever devised. It is superior to testing against games themselves because, as a trace, it is much more consistent than variations that will occur between runs of the actual game. This test is the same as running the actual game without the inconsistencies inherent in application testing.

25

The B850 AORUS ELITE ICE scores just above the 4,000 mark.

3DMark Time Spy Extreme

Time Spy Extreme is losing favor as a graphics benchmark in favor of Speed Way and Steel Nomad, but its CPU test is still a good measure of multi-core performance.

25

A result of 13,076 in the Time Spy Extreme CPU test puts the AORUS right in the middle of the pack, though the differences between the boards are minor.

Benchmarks - Gaming

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is brutal on graphics cards, but when things like ray tracing are removed, it becomes more sensitive to CPU and memory performance differences with top-tier graphics cards.

25

The differences between the boards are highly GPU-limited and minuscule with an RTX 4070 Ti Super.

Horizon Zero Dawn

When using the 'favor performance' preset, Horizon Zero Dawn can achieve high frame rates with powerful graphics cards.

25

289 FPS puts the AORUS mid-pack again, but with just 8 FPS separating the field, does the motherboard matter if all other components are equal?

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus received an update that added improved DLSS support, enhanced ray tracing features, and variable rate shading, among other things. Still, with a powerful graphics card, it is affected by CPU and memory performance at 1080p, though less so with a card like the RTX 4070 Ti Super.

25

All the tested motherboards performed essentially identically. The GPU and, to a lesser extent, the CPU are the main performance differentiators in gaming tests.

VRM and SSD Temperatures

These tests are performed to show off the differences between each motherboard's cooling assemblies. In the case of VRM testing, each board is subjected to a 20-minute Cinebench loop, while the SSD test records the peak temperature recorded during the lengthy 3DMark Storage test.

25

To be honest, given the positioning of the primary M.2 slot, I expected the AORUS to fare a little worse than this, but the large plate dissipates heat better than expected. A result of 53 degrees is a pleasant surprise.

25

This is a good result for the B850 AORUS ELITE ICE. With a load temperature of 58 degrees, it beats out the much more expensive ASUS and MSI X870E boards.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to judging a motherboard, the important criteria include price, features, aesthetics, and performance. Usually, aesthetics rate towards the rear in my thinking. A board could be green with pink polka dots if it offers exceptional value, features, and performance.

But a board like the AORUS ELITE ICE is a bit different. Plenty of folks will buy this board because it looks amazing, and why not?

It has a solid, if unspectacular, core feature set. The key to this is the support for WiFi 7. Add to that a capable VRM and good cooling. Installing a CPU up to a Ryzen 9 9950X3D will not pose any problem. PCIe 5.0 GPU and SSD support is also advantageous over older budget B650 models.

It will happily sit at the heart of even the most powerful system with any CPU and GPU you care to name, but its support for just three M.2 drives, limited PCIe expansion capacity, and lack of USB4 might count against it. However, for users with a single GPU and an SSD or two, these factors won't mean much.

25

But such things are easily forgivable on a board that costs $239. Spending this amount over a premium X870E option frees up money for a faster CPU, GPU, or more memory, which really adds performance to a system. If you want 5G or 10G LAN or a fancy I/O display, you'll need to spend more - a lot more.

If you are looking for a board that offers excellent value with a reasonable core feature set and care little for expense-adding bells and whistles, the GIGABYTE B850 AORUS ELITE WIFI7 ICE is a board that will serve you well - and look great while doing so.