Gigabyte GA-X99M-Gaming 5 (LGA 2011-3) Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The Gigabyte GA-X99M-Gaming 5 motherboard is available in the US from NewEgg at $259.99 and in the UK from Overclockers UK for a modest price of £169.99. This is one of the cheapest X99 motherboards on the market and certainly one of the cheapest X99M motherboards.

Summary

I was a little apprehensive when I first heard of the m-ATX range of X99 based motherboards to be released. The X99 series is supposed to be the ultimate pro-sumer option, ultimate CPU, ultimate RAM and ultimate performance. However, where they have had to downsize the PCB, they have had to knock 4 DIMM slots off, meaning you still get quad channel, but only 1 slot per channel; limiting the amount of RAM you can have (on this board, thats a mere 32GB). Apart from that, I am actually surprised at the performance of this part. It performed roughly where I expected a sized impaired version to be and sometimes much better. The m-ATX range has now given the opportunity for the smaller case users to upgrade to X99 without having to worry about buying a new case; although when buying a new motherboard, a new case would be nice.

The Gigabyte X99M is spectacular, does exactly what you want a X99 motherboard to do, with all of the features of the Gaming Series and the build quality and after service of Gigabyte. The bundled features are what you expect Gigabyte offer, like with the rest of the range; it’s nice that with a cut-down, cut price board, they haven’t cut the goodies. Performance side of things, we saw very good results compared to the other full-size motherboards and sometimes beating them; especially with that mild overclock to 4.3Ghz.

There’s not really anything wrong with the motherboard, everything does what you want. I did have a little confusion period where I couldn’t get the audio tests working, but that was all my fault; I needed coffee.

If I was to recommend anything for Gigabyte for the future of the X99M range, it would be to find a way to incorporate a much higher RAM quantity, just 32GB is rather limiting with the recent sighting of 32GB modules. Also, I would look into producing a WiFi option, the infrastructure is there, just save us the leg work and do it first.

Let’s see how the Gigabyte GA-X99M-Gaming 5 stacks up against its closest rivals from ASRock in our upcoming reviews.

Pros

• Great performance
• High quality audio
• Excellent LAN with the Killer chipset
• Very little performance penalty for its size

Cons

• Only 4 DIMS with 32GB allowance MAX

“Pack up your current m-ATX hardware and move on up to the X99 league with the GA-X99M-Gaming 5”

Thank you to Gigabyte for providing this review sample.