Gigabyte A520 AORUS ELITE Motherboard - Supports AMD Ryzen 5000 Series AM4 CPUs, 5+3 Phases Pure Digital VRM, up to 4733MHz DDR4 (OC), PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2, GbE LAN, USB 3.2 Gen2

Works great fits lots of PCIE cards and SATA drives as well as some nvme

Replacement board for a dodgy Asus Prime b450. Fitted it and it's running fast and smooth. Would recommend

Great looking board,my new Ryzen 3 3600 worked straight out of the box runs my ram at full speed too (3200mhz) I nice budget board I have no need too overclock.

So i decided to upgrade my system that i built over 10 years ago - a FX 8350, a ROG Crossfire V with 16gig of Vengance RAM. Not a bad system for 2014, but sadly it was showing its age.As a nurse I live off of scraps I manage to forage from bushes and rainwater i syphon from the gutter, so cash is generally at a premium (tiny violin). This meant that an all singing, all dancing, mummy & daddy, rich kid, system that i could show off on youtube was not within my means. I opted for a midrange upgrade that I would supliment with a decent graphics card later (still holding onto my NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960). I set a budget of about £280 and did some basic research, decided on a Ryzen 5 5500,32 gig of RAM and a fancy pcie SSD for the OS (my old system was so out of date it wouldnt run Win11). This just left about £90 for the motherboard, I checked out the boards in this price range and decided on this one. I checked all the specs and all the bits seemed to like eachother so i invited them all to the amazon party.I'm old, i mean ancient. I remember taking my first computer apart in 1997 - a pentium 1 (133Mhz!) with 32 meg of ram. I just wanted to see how it worked.I've been faffing with Pc building ever since - being skint and into tech makes you get good at PC repair so I have generally been good at cobbling systems together. This is just as well because after about an hour of taking all my shiny, new PC bits out of the box, cleaning my old case, setting up the fans, and slotting all the new bits in and finally switching it on, nothing happened! Ziltch, nada, nix, WTF! The PSU didn't tun on, I couldnt see any lights, no fans, nothing. Ok, so I read one of the reviews here (cheers bud) who said that he needed to flash the bios on his machine because it didn't recognise his new processor. I read that you need to unplug and take out everything apart from the motherboard and processor power connectors but take the processor, ram and anything else out before you use the internal qflash button. Luckily I had already downloaded the latest bios and unzipped it to a thumb drive (renaming it gigabite.bin) and so i ripped all the bits out and inserted it into the qflash usb port. I pressed the button... Nothing! WTF indeed. Ok, so now the faffing really began. I reset the CMOS manually, tried it again and the fan kind of started and stopped a bit. In desperation I put all the bits back in and tried again. For some reason this seemed to work (kind of). I was able to install windows and everything looked good, but ouch, the system started to crash, just turn itself off. WTAF! Ok, so I downloaded the gigabyte apps including the bios app and used that to flash the bios from my thumb drive. About 10 minutes of sweating later It had flashed to the latest bios version.2 days on and I have had no problems, everything is running as it should. Beware dear reader, this board may need some faffing, you have been warned.

It's a nice looking board with some great features, and for a full size ATX unit it's really good value to be honest. Can't fault it in that respect. What really gets my goat though is the fact that I bought it to upgrade to a 5600X and it's just not happening.All fans work on power-up and no audible signals from the board speaker I fitted, so I'm guessing that it doesn't have an F10 (or upwards) BIOS preloaded, and that particular BIOS was released by Gigabyte in Oct last year just before the 5600X landed in the UK the following month. Unless the board is defective in some other way, I just don't find that acceptable. Why can manufacturers not indicate which BIOS is loaded on to a motherboard on the packaging? I contacted Gigabyte to raise a ticket and they advised me to reflash the F10 BIOS; I've been trying to access the Gigabyte support site since Sunday. It's now Tuesday evening. According to the page on their site, the systems are down for routine maintenance... from 9th to 16th Aug. Seriously?! I can't deal with that sort of nonsense. I would have tried to test the board with a Ryzen 5 2400G but the A520 chipset doesn't permit that.Other niggles: in the top left of the board, right where the 2x4 pin CPU power sockets are located, there's a really unhelpful and utterly pointless piece of plastic stretching out from a bulky heatsink near the I/O panel, making access to the sockets incredibly restricted. Couple that with a chunky CPU cooler (like my Arctic Freezer Xtreme) and it really hinders installation. Also, the 4x SATA connectors are arranged in a 2x2 config down on the bottom right of the board, and oriented so that the SATA cable plugs will have all the retaining clips facing downwards. Pure genius. In most modern cases that leaves the bottom row clips just millimetres above the PSU cowling. Great fun disconnecting those. You get the feeling the board was designed by an electrical engineer who was ticking off boxes without thinking about practicalities.Board being sent back to Amazon for an MSI B550 replacement. Shame really, but my first fling with a Gigabyte board has left a sour taste. If you get one up and running though, happy days because it's impressive for the price (assuming you don't need a BIOS update from a support site that is offline). This board must be loaded with an F3 BIOS or below, which would make it at least 10-12 months old.Update 14/08/21: to be fair to Gigabyte I found out what the website outage was all about. Apparently they were the target of a hack, 112GB of sensitive info was obtained by criminals and if Gigabyte refused to cough up then the data would be released into the public domain. The outage was obviously down to Gigabyte barricading their servers. Can't blame them for that.