true.
I've had both the Gigabyte Aorus Master and Asus Maximus XI Hero. I wasn't happy with the Max XI, so I returned it and got the Aorus Master. I was far more unhappy with the Aorus Master so it's been returned and I'm going back to the Max XI Hero.

In a real world setup (i.e in a case with airflow), running an 8700k @ 5GHz 1.344v in P95 AVX, the Maximus XI Hero reported VRM temps of 53c-55c. The Aorus Master reported 45-47c. Yes the Asus board is hotter, but nowhere near to the extent that the video claims, which is why I've completely disregarded it. What I'm asking about is HWUnboxed's claims about Asus lying about the VRM setup.

Gigabyte Aorus Master:
- AFAIK the Gigabyte board has 2 superio's to control all the fan headers. For some reason if I connected my fans to the headers on the second superio and set the fan curve to hit 100% RPM when running P95, the fans would run at full speed, but then randomly "die" and go to 0 rpm. They would then start themselves back up after 5-15 seconds and follow the correct fan curve as if nothing had happened. Didn't happen with the fans connected through the main superio. Tested with different fans (NZXT AER Ps, Vardars, Noctuas, Fractals) - same deal. I've got no answer for what was going on here.
- Gigabyte control center apps (specifically Smart Fan) - A big draw for me to the GB board was that you could control fan headers from GPU temps. I then found out you can't do it through BIOS but have to use the windows app which sucks (might as well use SpeedFan). But I figured I'd give the app a try... It's terrible. It has to calibrate the fans and it would get different calibration results everytime you ran it - and the 100% calibration would always be ~800-1000 rpm for some reason (on 2000RPM Vardars) and 90% would be like 1800 RPM. And then half way through the PWM range it would say 60% - 0 RPM. No gigabyte, running a 60% PWM signal does not result in 0 RPM, c'mon now. I got around the wonky calibrating by first setting the fans to run at 100% using the "auto full speed" profile - the fans would now calibrate properly and I could switch to manual control. However, even though I specified a fan to follow the GPU temp (which it could see in the app) the fan would never change speed no matter how I adjusted the curve/fan settings. After a few restarts the GPU temp option just flat out disappeared from the Smart Fan app so I uninstalled it.
- The BIOS is not great. Version F4 is basically a crime against the tech world and is borderline unusable. F5 is much better but still not great at all vs say the Asus BIOS - it's at least usable.
- "Meh" memory training on the secondary ram timings.
- Onboard audio isn't well isolated - even though they've put a great DAC in there, the isolation isn't great and you can hear interference from the GPU load. No where near as bad as the Taichi, but not as good as the Asus.
- Weird frametiming issue in some games and benchmarks - for some reason the Aorus Master would post 400pts less GPU score on the Timespy benchmark than the Taichi or Maximus XI Hero (a 2-4fps lower average fps). It's because the frametimes are absurd for some reason the FPS counter in 3DMark updates very quickly, and it was pinging around so fast you actually couldn't read the number - why is the motherboard having any effect on the GPU frametimes? Tried numerous fresh installs, different driver versions etc, couldn't get rid of it. Went back to the Taichi and problem's gone - FPS counter is absolutely rock solid, correct GPU scores and no micro-stuttering. This is frankly unacceptable and was the main reason I returned it.

A quick overview of my main points of each board:

ASRock Z370 Taichi:

- Pokey VRM heatsink - no VRM temp sensor so no idea what temp it's actually running at.
- "Meh" memory training on the secondary ram timings with XMP enabled
- Onboard audio is poorly isolated (if you've got a good pair of headphones I hope you like hearing electrical interference from GPU load)
- Onboard audio quality seems to deteriorate with high overclocks. 4.7GHz 1.2v everything is fine, 5GHz 1.344v there is a "fizz" to everything - confirmed on my Philips X2s and Senn HD558s.
- CPU power draw - I've spoken in depth with ASRock support and BIOS team about this. The Taichi would seem to report much higher CPU wattage than other boards. I had a few special BIOS versions made for me to test, and eventually we got the power draw lowered by ~20w or so ([Beta] 1.61 2018/3/8 CPU TDP watts reading correction.). However power draw is still very high compared to other boards, at 5GHz @ 1.344v in P95 AVX the Taichi pulls a whopping 240-250w, the Aorus Master only pulls 205-215w in the same scenario. Before the BIOS update, the Taichi was reporting close to 300w in this scenario.

Asus Maximus XI Hero:

- Asus Armoury non-sense or whatever it was would insert itself into fresh windows installations which I hate - though I've heard you can now disable this in the BIOS.
- The main reason I returned it - there was a very odd hard-freeze that would come up ~1 time every 24 hours. It was completely unrelated to what load the PC was currently under and it happened both at stock and OC. The PC would freeze and soundloop, with other PCs this would just continue until you did a hard reset however if you left it for 10-15 seconds, it would resolve itself and the PC would continue as if nothing happened. I've had it happen while web browsing, during a game - I even had it happen during a Cinebench test and the score was 100% unaffected which means the PC is operating as expected in the background during the "freeze". I contacted Asus support and got the most mindblowingly useless reply so I just returned it. Was it due to premature BIOS? Ram sub timings (I found out side that Asus does some pretty aggressive sub timings) - I'm not sure, but I'm now curious to get another one to see if I had a bad board previously or if there was some other explanation.
- Doubts regarding the performance of the VRM setup - in my own testing the temps on the VRMs were great, but there was and still is a lot of doubts in the air about the VRM setup. If I'm spending this much money on a motherboard I want a damn good VRM setup.