Most of Gigabyte’s Intel Z690 Motherboards Only Features Two Audio Jacks

Although we’re going to try and cover all the newly launched Intel Z690 based motherboards more thoroughly before the retail availability date, we had a quick look already on what’s on offer and we were struck by something rather odd when it comes to Gigabyte, most of their new boards only have two 3.5 mm audio jacks around the back. This is not limited to their cheaper SKUs, but is found through the entire product stack.

We’re not entirely sure what’s going on here and will check with Gigabyte once someone is awake that we can talk to about it, but we’re fairly certain that this is going to cause a bit of a backlash from their customers. This was actually something we kind of saw in the leaked image of one of the Aero boards, as it didn’t look like it had any audio jacks at all, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, it seems to have something to do with Gigabyte’s move away from the Realtek ALC1220 Intel HD audio based codecs that the company have been using for the past few generations of boards.

We first spotted this on the Z690I Aorus Ultra, a Mini-ITX board and didn’t think too much of it, as Mini-ITX boards often have more limited audio ports. However, it turns out that everything from the fairly entry level Z690 Gaming X all the way up to the Z690 Aorus Xtreme has had their ports cut back, although there are models in between that still feature some variant of the ALC1220 audio codec. Most of the boards appear to feature the ALC4080, something we’ve already seen on some ASUS motherboards, although ASUS offers a full complement of ports on their boards. It should be noted that the ALC408x is a USB audio codec and as such doesn’t appear to be Intel HD audio compliant, if it matters.

Some boards only have two 3.5 mm jacks as mentioned, whereas others also have an optical S/PDIF jack, but this can apparently not be used at the same time as the 3.5 mm jack and we’re not sure if this requires you to unplug the 3.5 mm jack to use the S/PDIF interface. At least all of these boards sport a front panel audio header, but there are a couple of boards that make this whole change even more confusing. The first one is the Aero G, which in addition to the ALC4080 features an old and quite frankly poor quality ALC897 Intel HD codec for the front panel audio header. We really don’t understand why, as this is a huge downgrade even from the ALC1220.

Finally we have the Z690 Aorus Xtreme, which does away with Realtek altogether, in favour of an ESS ES9280AC USB DAC and a pair of ESS ES9080 DAC’s on top of that, all of which sits on a daughter card at the rear I/O. However, this board doesn’t appear to have any kind of front audio connector. We’d also expect more than a couple of 3.5 mm audio jacks and an optical S/PDIF out with a setup like this, but apparently that’s all we get. What’s more, the Z690 Aorus Xtreme comes with an additional “ESSential” USB DAC that could be used for front audio, but which seems kind of wasted considering the high-end audio that the board already sports. We really don’t follow Gigabyte’s logic here and although it’s nice to see some better quality audio solutions being used, we have a feeling a lot of people will want more than two audio jacks on their motherboard. We should also mention that none of Gigabyte’s competitors offer a similar cut-back on audio jacks.