Just looking at the things I notice: MSI board comes with M.2 heatsinks for four ports. Gigabyte board has three total M.2 ports, and heatsink for only one. MSI board has a much beefier chipset heatsink MSI has much beefier VRM cooling Both support BIOS flashback (not sure why you'd need it on a Z790 board, but nice to have, I guess), MSI has a clear CMOS button, as opposed to a jumper that has to be tripped (or pulling the CMOS battery) in the event you need to clear it MSI rear port selection is far more robust. The MSI board features an additional (10Gb/s) USB-C port, an additional 3x USB Type A 3.2 Ports, MSI has Intel Wifi 6E as opposed to Realtek Wifi 5 MSI has Bluetooth 5.3 vs 4.1 on the Gigabyte MSI has Intel 2.5GbE LAN vs Realtek MSI has more fan headers (possibly more LED/RGB connectors - I'm not counting those across the two boards) MSI has 7 SATA ports to the Gigabyte's six MSI probably has more robust on-board RGB/lighting MSI arguably has the better looking board between the two. All of those mean that MSI thinks their board is worth an increase of ~60% in cost. I can say this: the performance of whatever CPU and GPU you install on the two should be more-or-less the same. Are all of those features worth the increase? Tough to say. It probably wouldn't be for me. More on reddit.com

Hey, which board did you end up getting. Im looking at the D AC one and there are no reviews on it. More on reddit.com

its just a mobo, you will get the exact same performance with Gigabyte Z790 D DDR4 and with Aorus Elite DDR4 Mobo. tbh you can find cheaper mobos, and you will gain the same performance with: b660/b760 by gigabyte with the word "aorus" with it. or MSI: b760m-A/mortar/tomahawk/gaming plus. More on reddit.com

Get a 13700K, a mid-range motherboard, and a 4080. More on reddit.com