Gigabyte Gaming K5 Z270 Motherboard Review

Gigabyte Gaming K5 The new Intel Z370 platform may be here already, but there is still plenty of life to be found for the Z270 platform. Of course, most visible stem from the fact that the new 8th generation CPUs only work on Z370. therefore, it makes sense that many users who are still purchasing any processors from the 6th or 7th generation of Intel CPUs will be looking at Z270 series motherboard. Gigabyte is clearly aware of this, and have just released their Z270X Gaming K5 Motherboard under Aorus brand. Tailored towards the gaming market, this new motherboard comes equipped all the high-end features you would expect. It supports dual channel unbuffered DDR4 memory, Three-way graphics card support, triple NVMe PCIe SSDs, dual ultra fast M.2 storage, Intel Optane, high-definition audio, high-speed LAN, RGB lighting and much more. Features Supports 7th/ 6th Generation Intel® Core™ Processors Dual Channel Non-ECC Unbuffered DDR4, 4 DIMMs Fast USB 3.1 Gen 2 with USB Type-C™ and Type-A 3-Way Graphics Support with Dual Armor and Ultra Durable™ Design Triple NVMe PCIe SSDs in RAID 0 Support NVMe PCIe Gen3 x4 U.2 Connector Dual Ultra-Fast M.2 with PCIe Gen3 x4 & SATA interface Intel® Optane™ Memory Ready Sound Blaster X-Fi MB5 + ALC 1220 120dB SNR HD Audio Killer™ E2500 Gaming Network USB DAC-UP 2 with Adjustable Voltage RGB FUSION LED Light Show design Swappable Overlay for Accent LED Smart Fan 5 features Multiple Temperature Sensors and Hybrid Fan Headers Lightning-Fast Intel® Thunderbolt™ 3 AIC Support GIGABYTE UEFI DualBIOS™ APP Center Including EasyTune™ and Cloud Station™ Utilities If you like RGB lighting you'll find 16.8 million RGB colours over to light zones with seven different lighting effects, as well as one RGBW light strip pin header. If you're big on your audio like me, you'll be happy to see, and I hear, that it comes with ALC 1220. With a powerful amp for speakers and headphones built-in, you'll be able to enjoy your favourite media as it was intended. ALC 1220 120dB SNR HD Audio "The ALC1220 is a high-performance multi-channel High Definition Audio Codec with up to 120dB SNR for crystal clear audio and features such as Smart Headphone Amp, 114dB SNR recording for precise voice chats and hardware decoding of DSD128, ensuring users get the best possible audio quality from their PC." - Gigabyte Sound Blaster X-Fi MB5 Software "The Sound Blaster X-Fi MB5 provides you with everything you need to stretch your audio experience potential. It’s a comprehensive suite of tools, equipped with cutting-edge technology and premium audio quality, effects and features to support your needs. Featuring SBX Pro Studio™ suite of technologies, it gives you the fullest audio experience – like no other." - Gigabyte A Closer Look The Aorus motherboard looks fantastic, with mostly black hardware and a few shiny highlights giving it a really nice contrast. There's a lot more black and white type motherboards hitting the market now. Of course, that's not a bad thing, as this looks great and it's going to show off the RGB lighting much better than a brightly coloured motherboard would. At the top, you'll find a pair of chunky heat sinks keeping the power delivery hardware nice and cool. They look great finished in black, and match up nicely with that angular rear I/O guard. Of course, they'll also help the motherboard perform better, and maintain overclocks. The board uses high-quality 10K Black Capacitors, which promise high performance and a very long lifespan. Four armoured DIMM slots comes with their own RGB light bars. Their reinforced design will prevent the motherboard from bending, and improve the general life span of the slots. Connectivity There are plenty of connectivity options on this motherboard, supporting storage devices of all shapes and sizes. Those using multiple graphics cards will be happy, with three full-size PCIe slots. The top two are spaced to support a pair of extra-thick graphics cards in SLI. Of course, with regular dual-slot cards, you should be able to fit up to three of them too. There are M.2 drive mounts built into the motherboard, allowing for Raid 0 for extremely fast loading times. The rear I/O isn't as packed as I would like for a gaming motherboard. However, there's just enough USB ports, and a Type-C for good measure. There's also a PS2 port, Killer LAN, optical, and audio jacks. Display connections come from the HDMI port, and a single DisplayPort. Finally, you'll find the audio hardware mounted in the bottom left. It uses a trace on the motherboard to isolate the signals, a powerful amp, and Japanese Nichicon Audio Capacitors. One nice feature, albeit one that only the big enthusiasts will use, is the swappable Op-AMP; TI Burr Brown® NE5532P operational amplifier. Testing and Methodology Test Procedure Here at eTeknix, we endeavour to disclose vital information regarding the benchmarking process so that readers can quantify the results and attempt to replicate them using their hardware. When it comes to motherboard reviews, the benchmarks are pretty self-explanatory although there are a few exceptions. Rember that your choice of motherboard, the silicon lottery, and other factors can yield different numbers, and there's always a margin for error when using the software. Therefore, your experience may vary. Each benchmark runs three times, and the average figure is taken to try to reduce the effect of hardware variation. Of course, any relevant details regarding the parameters will be listed below. Test Systems X399 Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM - Crucial DDR4 2400MHz Quad-Channel 32GB CPU Cooler – Noctua D15S Graphics Card – Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit X299 Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM - Crucial DDR4 2400MHz Quad-Channel 32GB CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive - Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit AM4 Ryzen R3, R5 and R7 Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM - GeIL DDR4 2977MHz Dual Channel 16GB CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive - Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit Z270 Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM - Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) 2666 MHz CPU Cooler – Noctua D15S Graphics Card – Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit X99 - Our GPU Review Test Bench Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM – Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) 2666 MHz CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Open Air Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 64-bit Games Used All games are tested on a 60 Hz display with V-Sync off for all tests. Previously we would use "extreme" presets, but these have now been adjusted to "Medium" or equivalent to better test the capabilities of the CPU, not the GPU. Rise of the Tomb Raider (Steam) DX12 Medium Preset Pure Hair Off Deus Ex (Steam) DX12 Medium Preset Ghost Recon: Wildlands (Uplay) Medium Preset Turf Effects Off Far Cry Primal (Uplay) Normal Preset Software Used 3DMark Fire Strike (download) FireStrike (1080p) Benchmark Unigine Superposition (download) 1080p Extreme Benchmark PCMark 10 Professional (download) Express Benchmark WPrime (download) 32M and 1024M Power usage recorded at 1024M 50% complete, thermals recorded at 75% CineBench R15 (download) CPU Multi CPU Single Handbrake (download) Custom MP4 to MKV 4K conversion (details below) AIDA64 Engineer (download) CPU-Z (download) HWMonitor (download) Handbrake To stress processors to their absolute limit and accurately judge their performance in video editing workloads, we transcode a 7.7GB compilation of gaming footage; this particular file is freely available from here. The captured footage is 22 minutes and 12 seconds long, it has a bit rate of 50.1 Mbps and it uses the Advanced Video Codec. Additionally, the video runs at a constant 30 frames-per-second and opts for a 3820 x 2140 (4K) resolution. Once loaded into Handbrake, we then transcode the 4K MP4 to an MKV file using the "normal" profile. Other Notes A rest period of 2-5 minutes is observed between each piece of software allowing the system to return to its idle power usage and temperatures. Background services like Windows Update are checked to not be running during the testing period by setting WiFi to Metered Connection. Thanks Thank you to Noctua, Crucial, ASUS, Gigabyte, Lian-Li, be quiet!, OCZ, for providing the hardware that helps makes these tests possible! Synthetic Benchmarks 3DMark Firestrike The Gaming K5 is certainly competitive, keeping in mind it is on the slightly older Z270 platform. So while it may not look the fastest, it is still quite fast for the Z270 platform. It delivered a respectable score of 19865, however, once it was overclocked this score boosted up to 21666. Stock Overclocked Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme Unigine is a much more GPU bound task, and in this test the motherboard hit a fantastic 5515, putting it on par with pretty much everything else on the market. Of course, once it was overclocked, we saw that score increase again, hitting a blazingfast 5530. Stock Overclocked PCMark 10 Express PCMark 10 is a great test of all round system performance, from day today browsing, to editing in software such as Photoshop. The K5 motherboard gave a very average score of 5150, but again this is a fantastic score for this chipset and the processor used. However, once overclocked it hit an even more impressive 6207, moving it significantly up the chart. Stock Overclocked WPrime 32M and 1024M The WPrime performance was certainly respectable. Obviously we weren't expecting huge things from the processor used, but it managed to beat out the BIOSTAR Z270 motherboard by a fair margin at stock and overclock values. Stock Overclocked Cinebench R15 Cinebench is a demanding task on any processor, but it's a really good test of motherboards to test throughput of various devices such as the memory and the graphics card. In this respect, the gaming K5 performed respectably with a score of 941. Obviously not the highest score we've ever seen, but again it is the fastest one we have on our chats for the Z270 platform. Stock Overclocked Handbrake MP4 to MKV Conversion 4K Handbrake performance wasn't anything too crazy, and again it's right where will you would have expected it to be for this processor and chipset at stock and overclock values. Stock Overclocked AIDA 64 Memory Bandwidth and Latency The memory performance on this motherboard is fantastic, it beat out the other Z270 motherboard on our charts, and gave us some impressive read and write performance. Another benefit of Z270, is that it delivered very low memory latency. Gaming Performance In regards to gaming performance, there is a lot of nice things to say about the Z270 platform. It's long been a popular choice for gamers around the world, and that's clearly represented in the Deus Ex test, where we saw some very impressive scores; easily hitting 131.2 FPS on average. Furthermore, we saw a fantastic score of 184.5 in Rise of the Tomb Raider, 130.1 in Ghost Recon, and just over 100 in Far Cry Primal. Obviously, this is a gaming motherboard, so we were expecting good performance here, and we were not disappointed. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Rise of the Tomb Raider Ghost Recon: Wildlands Far Cry Primal Power Consumption and Temperatures Power Consumption This motherboard isn't particularly crazy in terms of features and it is using an older chipset, so as you would expect power draw is quite low. At stock values it maxed out at just 95.3w while taxing the CPU. Once overclocked, it barely broke 100w. Stock Overclocked Final Thoughts Pricing The Gigabyte GA Z270X Gaming K5 ATX motherboard is available now from most major retailers for around £165. This is still quite a lot of money, but it is certainly competitive for the Z270 platform, and for the level of features that we saw included on this motherboard. For those who are eager to invest in Intel 6th or 7th generation processors, it seems like an ideal Choice. Of course, with the introduction of the new 8th generation CPUs from Intel and their Z370 motherboards, we expect the 7th generation processors to soon drop in price, and that is going to make this motherboard far more appealing to many consumers. Overview Overall, I think this is one of the most competitive Z270 motherboards on the market today. Of course, that's not particularly difficult given that it's one of the last or most recent Z270 motherboards to have been released, so there's plenty of market experience for Gigabyte to have learnt from over the years. Connectivity on this motherboard is fantastic, with support for all major types of USB, including 3.1 Gen 2 and Type-C. External storage is one thing, but those who want blazing fast internal storage will be pleased to see that there are triple NVMe PCIe SSD mounts, that support Raid 0 for extreme performance. Of course, with M.2 support, Intel Optane memory support, U.2 support, and more, storage is not going to be a problem. Gaming Gaming performance on this motherboard was obviously impressive. Sure, we have seen higher performance from many of the motherboards and their respective chipsets, but keep in mind we have tested a lot of more expensive and high-end enthusiast products recently, and that's somewhat skewing the results. To expect the performance of this motherboard and it's respective processor to be on par with those would be unrealistic given it's much more affordable. Of course, it delivered the kind of performance a typical gamer/consumer could expect for a reasonable amount of money, and the added features of this motherboard certainly sweeten the deal beyond the raw gaming performance. Being able to mount multiple graphics cards is obviously a big benefit, with 3-way graphics support and armoured PCIe slots that are able to easily sustain the weight of modern high-end graphics cards. Running three cards in SLI or in Crossfire is going to give you incredible performance, in both gaming tasks and heavy-duty rendering tasks. Added Value Speaking of added features, the use of Killer e2500 gaming LAN, is certainly welcome for those who care for high-performance networking. I'm also very happy to see the inclusion of the ALC1220 audio codecs, as well as Sound Blaster X-Fi audio processing. Even more so, those who wish to use an external DAC will be happy to see high powered USB ports to match their specific requirements. RGB lighting is included, although I would be surprised if it wasn't in today's market given how popular the feature has become. The use of Gigabyte RGB Fusion LED lighting system allows you to really customise the lighting too, and even sync other Gigabyte hardware. Should I Buy One? With this level of features, extensive storage options, high-end gaming performance, and enthusiasts grade audio performance, the Gigabyte Gaming K5 is really a jack of all trades. Of course, you can get high performance from some of the newer CPUs on the market, as well as from some of the newer chipsets, but you can expect to pay a much bigger premium for that privilege. If you're eager to invest in Z270, the gaming K5 is the way to go. Pros Great performance 3 x M.2 Mounts with Shield Armoured PCIe Slots Armoured DDR4 DIMMS High-end Audio Hardware Multi-GPU support RGB Lighting Trusted brand name ACL1220 audio Cons None