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Gigabyte X99-Gaming-5P (LGA 2011-3) Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The Gigabyte X99-Gaming-5P is available in the UK from Scan Computers for £228 and available in the USA for $309.99 from Newegg. A little research shows this pricing is around 10% more than the standard X99-Gaming-5 motherboard.

Summary

I was a little confused having this motherboard given to me, why make a revision on an already great motherboard? After my testing and living with the motherboard, I’m completely clued in. The key target audience for this board is gamers and overclockers, offering support for up to 3333MHz RAM speeds and those updated CPU, DIMM and PCIe pins really offer the best bandwidth allowance for the components. Then that Killer network chip and Creative sound codec really set this apart for the gamers, high-speed networking and high-quality audio to smash the opposition.

I found overclocking the RAM a breeze on this motherboard with an extremely stable 2666MHz overclock. Along with overclocking the RAM, I added additional voltage to our CPU, to a very conservative 1.35v which gave a stable 4.5GHz overclock on our i7-5960X. I know this is a little low for this chip, but this is all cores enabled, which slightly lowers the top clock speed.

Now I really like the new aesthetic features added into this motherboard, namely the LEDs. Some might see this as a pointless gimmick, but that ambient lighting is nice to watch in a dark room with some chilling music on. Every other feature of this motherboard reminds me of the original X99-Gaming-5, which has massive focus for the gamers; I think that hasn’t been lost in the attempt to add more overclocker focused features.

Performance wise, I believe X99 motherboards are currently offering more than enough bandwidth for the components, so instead of the motherboard being the bottleneck, it’s now down to the CPU, RAM, GPU or storage devices to catch up.

If I was to think of anything that could be implemented into this motherboard, it would be onboard power and reset buttons and a DEBUG LEG, something that would be extremely useful for overclockers. Along with this, I think this board could be condensed to an official ATX size, there seems to be a fair amount of space around the components; however I know the point of this was to be able to overclock massively without temperatures affecting other components.

Pros