We happened to have an H370 Aorus Gaming 3 WiFi motherboard handy during testing and confirmed that it did not enable control of the SSD's LEDs.

The support list is currently very narrow, including only their Z390 Aorus boards and the X299 Aorus Master. The Aorus SSD's lighting can also be controlled through GIGABYTE's RGB Fusion 2.0 utility, but only when the SSD is installed in a supported GIGABYTE motherboard.

On its own, the drive cycles through colors while pulsing the brightness of the LEDs. The RGB lighting illuminates the Aorus eagle logo with a solid color. The heatsink and lighting on the Aorus SSD help it fit in with other Aorus-branded products from GIGABYTE. That is not likely to be a problem for the Aorus SSDs given the choice of the Phison E12 platform. We have previously reviewed RGB SSDs in larger form factors (SATA and PCIe add-in cards) and often find that the premium aesthetics aren't backed up by premium performance. The Aorus SSDs aren't the first M.2 drives with heatsinks that we've tested, but they are the first M.2s with RGB LEDs to cross our testbed. The Aorus RGB M.2 is our first look at the performance of smaller E12 drives, which are unavoidably challenged by having fewer NAND flash chips to use in parallel. We've repeatedly found this combination to be competitive in the high-end NVMe market segment, though all of our previous tests were in the 1TB capacity class. The Aorus RGB SSD is based on the now familiar combination of Toshiba 64-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory and the Phison E12 controller. Both M.2 and PCIe add-in card models are hitting the market starting today, and we're taking a look at both of the M.2 models. Their new Aorus RGB SSDs are high-end NVMe drives designed to catch the attention of gamers. GIGABYTE entered the SSD market last year somewhat timidly with entry-level SATA drives, and they've been working their way up the market since.

Aorus led controller