Gigabyte G1.Sniper M5 (Z87) Motherboard Review

Now if you haven’t seen our review on the full G1.Sniper 5, then we don’t want to give to much away, but it is worth noting that we achieved 4.9GHz at a modest 1.38V and with us not wanting to push too far past 1.4V as we’re trying to simulate a 24/7 overclock, we honestly couldn’t see the micro-ATX version that we have here coming too close to it. Boy how we was wrong.

We started at a base multiplier of 46 and left the voltages on auto for the time being and proceeded to move up from there, to 47 and ran a bunch of different applications including Cinebench, Prime95, SuperPI and 3DMark 11 to check for stability. Of course this didn’t even break a sweat and ran effortlessly, which is when we knew it was time to push things even more. 48 was the same story with some fantastic results being spewed out in our benchmarks. Not content on stopping there however, we moved up to 49 with the fear of freezing or blue-screening and after several times of running the tests we had in place, it was still 100% stable, all on auto voltage which after checking referred to 1.368V, which is slightly under what the fully-fledged Sniper 5 required.

Some really strong results and a speed that surprised us and would keep any consumer happy, especially with a board such as this.

While 4.9GHz was a nice overclock, we wanted more as 5GHz has a ring to it, and as such we pushed further, but after requiring 1.41V we decided that it was too high and the temperatures reflected that, and thus we ended up sticking with 4.9GHz.