A new range of AORUS ICE series components showcase a white and silver livery, plus ‘Stealth’ back-connector motherboards are once again on display.
A new range of AORUS ICE series components showcase a white and silver livery, plus ‘Stealth’ back-connector motherboards are once again on display.
GIGABYTE’s AORUS gaming offshoot is exhibiting a selection of high performance components at Computex 2025 that put a new twist on some of this year’s well-established hardware lines. Each of their major component partners – AMD, Intel and NVIDIA – are quietly beavering away developing new hardware platforms, so this year AORUS have license to experiment more with aesthetics, innovative form factors and niche product designs.
A Sprinkling of ICE
Historically all-white systems have been criminally underserved by the component market and so we heartily welcome efforts to bring more into the fold by the big names in PC components. It appears that AORUS in particular are finally getting serious as they’re showcasing a range of ‘ICE’ designs boasting clean lines and white/silver combination colourschemes.
There’s no better demonstration of this than the system they’ve assembled to as part of the Computex expo:
This white and silver system has a pretty awesome specification:
X870 AORUS STEALTH ICE
AORUS GeForce RTX 5090 STEALTH ICE 32G
AMD Ryzen 9950X3D
V-COLOR Manta XFinity RGB 32GB (16GBx2) 6400MT/s Gaming Memory
AORUS Gen5 14000 SSD 2TB
AORUS WAATERFORCE II 360 ICE
AORUS ELITE P1000W PG5 ICE
GIGABYTE C500 PANORAMIC STEALTH ICE
AORUS GeForce RTX 5090 STEALTH ICE 32G
AMD Ryzen 9950X3D
V-COLOR Manta XFinity RGB 32GB (16GBx2) 6400MT/s Gaming Memory
AORUS Gen5 14000 SSD 2TB
AORUS WAATERFORCE II 360 ICE
AORUS ELITE P1000W PG5 ICE
GIGABYTE C500 PANORAMIC STEALTH ICE
The AORUS RTX 5090 STEALTH ICE 32G’s 12V-2×6 connector is discretely placed on the back of the card,
with cables routed along the card’s edge
As well as the ICE theme, AORUS are also once again showing off their STEALTH hidden connector standard on the motherboard, case and GPU. This standard places the power and primary I/O connectors on the back of the motherboard and GPU, hiding both connector and cables from view and letting the components themselves take centre stage. Surface-mounted components such as NVME SSDs are behind plates on the front of the motherboard in hidden M.2 slots.
The end result is an impressively clean internal layout, shown off to great effect through the tempered glass of the C500 PANORAMIC case, but it should be emphasised that there’s a major interdependency inherent to each of this backwards connector layout standards.
While a STEALTH motherboard isn’t necessarily required for a STEALTH GPU (in contrast to some competing solutions), a STEALTH motherboard does require a STEALTH-compatible case. Certainly something to keep in mind when planning such a build.
AORUS are also extending both ICE and STEALTH down to more mainstream components. This B850 ICE STEALTH design is joined by B850 mATX and ITX ICE boards (the former with a fusion of traditional Chinese and more modern aesthetic designs), and even GIGABYTE’s monitor range has a white bezel and mount variant in the form of the M27Q2 with Quantum Dot technology.
Each of AORUS’s 800-series motherboards also supports the so-called X3D Turbo Mode. Now into its second iteration, the feature squeezes more gaming performance out of Ryzen X3D CPUs by disabling both Simultaneous Multithreading and the 2nd CCD (where applicable) while also tweaking voltages and power limits to improve boost clocks. In a single click therefore any 9000X3D-series CPU would operate like a single-CCD model without SMT but with operating frequencies tweaked upwards. GIGABYTE estimate performance improvements of up to 15% for workloads that benefit from these changes.
Keeping a Low Profile
Fans will be pleased to see the RTX 5060 OC Low Profile 8G, one of an increasingly rare breed of low profile form factor GPUs with gaming credentials. It’s a 182mm-long dual-slot design that’s only half as tall as a regular RTX 5060 but can still support up-to 4 displays.
AI Cannot Be Denied
Finally, professionals will soon be able to take advantage of a pair of compact form factor systems designed specifically for AI and compute.
The GIGABYTE AI TOP ATOM is a desktop Grace Blackwell AI supercomputer powered by NVIDIA DGX Spark capable of up to 1000 AI TOPS (FP4). It’s intended for the fine-tuning of up-to 70bn parameter AI models and testing models with up-to 200bn parameters.
The AORUS RTX 5090 AI BOX meanwhile is an external water-cooled GPU solution for laptops and small form factor desktops. As well as gaming, it offers high performance hardware for development environments, AI, rendering and more. Connection plug-and-play is via Thunderbolt 5 and USB4 2.0, with peripheral support for Thunderbolt 5 and USB 3.2 Gen2.
