Gigabyte Z97MX-Gaming 5 (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review

Software Overview

All Gigabyte’s software is provided through their “App Center” program which is pretty nice. It is essentially a little desktop widget that has all the Gigabyte software listed and you can click on each one to launch it. USB blocker provides you with options to block certain USB devices either by type or by vendor. This seems like more of a business feature: I’m pretty sure Intel introduced a similar feature with its B85 chipset last year. The @BIOS program gives you the options to update your BIOS from within the OS. If you prefer to do it from within the BIOS you can do with Gigabyte’s Q Flash utility – all you need is the BIOS file on the root directory of a USB flash drive. Next up is Gigabyte’s Cloud Station which provides a range of apps to allow you to use your smartphone or tablet device to communication, control and share resources between your PC and device via your local network. Gigabyte’s EasyTune utility is an OC Tuner utility that allows you to use preset OC profiles or allows you to create your own more advanced OC profiles. You can of course use the BIOS if you’re happier to do it that way but the ability to do it within the OS is an added bonus. EZ Setup is a storage utility that allows you to activate various Intel features (Smart Response, Smart Connect etc). Fast Boot is Gigabyte’s way of speeding up the motherboard post time to allow you to boot in quicker. This is nice to see because on most modern SSD systems take longer to get to the OS loading screen than they do to actually load the OS. Gigabyte’s Game Controller program allows you to tweak and tune various macros and hot keys to enhance your gaming. The system information viewer is fairly self explanatory – it provides real time system information on the various key components of your system. It also allows you to tweak and tune various fan profiles. Gigabyte’s Smart TimeLock is a feature that will appeal to parents or users without much self-discipline. It allows you to set periods of time when the computer can be used, so for example you could make the computer unavailable in the morning to stop your child playing games before they go to school, or you could lock the computer down in the evening to make sure you go to the gym after work! The Gigabyte Smart Recovery 2 utility allows you to easily arrange your system backups by setting up an automated backup service. Smart Recovery 2, once set up, backs your files up every hour in the background. It keeps all backups of a 48 hour period in a rolling fashion. It also has a utility built in to allow you to recover your system using any saved backup image files from the past 48 hours. The LiveUpdate utility is a useful part of the software package that allows you to easily update the motherboard utilities and motherboard drivers to the latest available versions all in one unified location.