- Intel Z97
- Celeron / Core i3 / Core i5 / Core i7 / Intel Core 4th Gen (LGA 1150) / Intel Core 5th Gen (LGA 1150) / Pentium / Xeon (LGA1150)
- DDR3 3200*(*O.C.)/ 3100*/ 3000*/ 2933*/ 2800*/ 2666*/ 2600*/ 2500*/ 2400*/ 2200*/ 2133*/ 2000*/ 1866*/ 1800*/ 1600/ 1333
Good mid range gaming board
08/14/2014
This review is from: GIGABYTE G1 Gaming GA-Z97X-Gaming 5 (rev. 1.0) LGA 1150 Intel Z97 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
Pros:
• I rather like the change in color scheme from green/black to the new red/black, I like Asus and Gigabyte boards equally but always pre
• Price is reasonable for what you get and compares well with other boards in it’s class
• Supports all new 4th and 5th generation socket 1150 CPU’s
• As this is a gaming board one of the key features is sound enhancement, as such it has a few nice set of features that bring you crisp clear sound while gaming ie.. Realtek ALC1150 115dB SNR HD Audio with Built-in rear audio amplifier, Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi MB3 gaming audio suite, Audio Noise Guard with LED path lighting
• Gold plated display and audio ports, High end Nichicon audio capacitors. The last two are pretty standard on gaming boards these days and you can’t really measure how much better sound is with it or without it for that matter.
• Also to help cut out video and audio distortion the back panel has gold plated HDMI and audio connectors, again hard to measure the impact of these vs regular connectors
• I also picked up that the left and right sound channels are integrated on two separate PCB layers, hard to measure again how much that adds to your gaming sound experience, sounds great though.
• The Z97X G5 feature the Killer™ E2200 from Qualcomm Atheros, also the standard in gaming and high end motherboards
• Integrated onboard graphics processor that supports up to three displays, has 512MB memory, not enough to play BF4 but enough to browse around the internet on.
• I really like the three bios modes, very useful for those that like to overclock. You have the classic mode for old school, the smart tweak mode for those that want to push your CPU and RAM to the limits. It also has a dashboard look or what Gigabyte calls the “Startup Guide” from which you get quick access to all the various features
• Two PCIe 3 slots, they share 16 lanes, so you can run one video card using all 16 lanes or two at x8. This allows you to run two Nvidia or AMD cards in SLI or CFX. I only ran one AMD R9 290 and it was plenty or power for my 27 inch LCD.
Cons:
• The Z97X-Gaming 5 PCB measures 305mm x 225mm, making it almost an inch narrower than standard ATX (305mm x 244mm), not a train smash at all but still real estate (space) on boards are valuable.
• There is no debug LED or power/reset buttons on the board, as a gamer and open case bencher I really like to have this so I can see why my overclock fails, also handy to push reset or power button if you don’t have the board connected to a case. Also for a few dollars more you get that with the G7
• Only one LAN port, almost all gaming boards have two
Overall Review:
Newegg delivered the review board in a couple of days in their distinct brown Newegg box, it was securely packaged.
The Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 5 motherboard box was all black and red with white lettering. As for most boards the back is covered with displaying all the features which you can read at your leisure after you installed it.
The box contents was a bit disappointing, apart from the board itself and a couple of manuals and stickers you only got four SATA cables and a SLI bridge.
My test setup featured the following hardware in a Thor gaming case:
Intel i7-4770k
Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 5 (this review board)
HIS AMD R9 290 video card
2 x 4GB G.Skill Ripjaws Z 2400 Mhz CL10
OCZ Vertex 4 512GB SSD
Corsair H100i liquid cooling
Rosewell 750W PSU
Windows 7 Ultimate (I still like Win 7 over 8 when it comes to desktop PC’s)
After power up I commenced to install Win 7, I then went back to play around in the bios.
For overclockers, the board supports a maximum base clock of 266.66MHz and a highly-unlikely CPU clock ratio of 80x. The CPU and DRAM voltage maxes out at 1.80V and 2.10V respectively.
I managed to get a decent overclock of 4.5 Gz in the 4770k with vcore around 1.28 volt, I did push it to 4.8 Ghz but the CPU temps got a bit on the high side. I will actually tone it down to 4Ghz 24/7 which should be plenty for gaming. I set the Ram at XMP and it took immediately running at 2400Mhz stable.
Playing games the sound was quite decent, nothing to complain about, the onboard sound compares very well to my Soundblaster X-Fi card
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