Gigabyte Z97MX-Gaming 5 (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review

Introduction, Specifications and Packaging While mini-ITX is the "fashionable" small form factor of choice for most compact system builders, the micro-ATX form factor is still popular as it offers a better compromise between size, features and cost. Unlike mini-ITX motherboards micro-ATX motherboards require less R&D, encounter less technical challenges and are much cheaper to execute as a result. Enter Gigabyte's latest Intel 9 Series based motherboard, the GA-Z97MX-Gaming 5. At just $130 this motherboard offers a great balance between size, performance and features - at least on paper. Today we will be putting this micro-ATX offering from Gigabyte through its paces to see how it shapes up in practice. As a Gaming series motherboard it comes with the usual beefed up audio implementation and Killer networking as well as support for multiple GPUs meaning it has most things a gamer could want in a motherboard. Being an Intel 9 Series motherboard there's also support for the new storage options like M.2 and SATA Express. Below you can find detailed specifications on exactly what this motherboard offers: Packaging and Accessories As we've seen with Gigabyte's latest Intel 9 Series motherboards the Gigabyte "eye" makes an appearance. Typically we only saw this on VGA products in the past. The back details the features of the motherboard, much of the focus is on the audio implementation. Once the box is opened up we get a little flap on the inside which details those key Gaming series features more. Included is a variety of documentation, driver & utility DVD and case sticker. Four SATA III cables, a black labelled and colour coded rear I/O and a SLI bridge make up the accessories. A Closer Look & Layout Analysis Gigabyte's Z97MX Gaming 5 is a fairly attractive little motherboard. The design is fairly safe with the usual black and red colour scheme and nothing too garish. The layout of the board is very well executed, which is important given the small size. As far as I am concerned the power connectors are all ideally located and so are the front panel connectors. It might be nice to see the central system fan header located closer to the edge of the board for cable management but this location is also ideal for rear mounted exhaust fans located above the rear I/O. Note how this board has just a 4 phase CPU VRM, given the space I think Gigabyte could have opted for 6 or 8 phases instead. The PCB is a dark brown not a black which may bug some people. However, the overall aesthetic is still clean and tidy and the fact the PCB is brown is fairly difficult to identify. Around the CPU socket we see the 4 phase VRM, dual CPU fan headers and the CPU 8 pin. Round by the DRAM area we find a system fan header and the USB 3.0 header, this provides USB 3.0 through the Z97 chipset. The PCH heatsink is fairly small but has to be given the board size. We find the SATA ports and SATA express connectors down here. Three full length PCIe lanes is great to see on a compact mATX board like this. You also get an M.2 slot tucked in with a variety of screw points for different sized devices. The audio comes with its own separated PCB, high-end nichicon caps and DIP switches to control the audio gain. In terms of connectivity we find front panel audio, a system fan header, two USB 2.0 headers and colour coded front panel connectors. The rear I/O offers up the following: 1 x PS/2 keyboard port 1 x PS/2 mouse port 1 x D-Sub port 1 x DVI-D port 1 x HDMI port 4 x USB 3.0/2.0 ports 4 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports 1 x RJ-45 port 1 x optical S/PDIF Out connector 5 x audio jacks Note the four USB 2.0 ports in yellow, these are optimised for cleaner power delivery if you want to use a DAC device. Along the top we can see the main heatsinks, these are fairly wobbly and I think Gigabyte need to move towards a screw not push-pin securing mechanism. The Test System and Test Software Before we delve into any testing we would like to take this opportunity to review our test system and thank those sponsors who kindly provided us with test equipment to make our work possible. We offer our thanks to: Intel for supplying us with a Core i7 4770K processor, which we reviewed here. Kingston for supplying us with a Hyper X 3K 240GB solid state drive, which we reviewed here, and the Hyper X USB 3.0 DTHX Flash Drive, which we reviewed here. Corsair for supplying us with a Hydro Series H100i liquid CPU cooler, which we reviewed here, and a Vengeance Pro 16GB 2400MHz memory kit, which we reviewed here. Be Quiet for supplying us with a Straight Power E9 680W power supply unit, which we reviewed here. Plextor for supplying us with a 256GB M.2 solid state drive, which we reviewed here. Sapphire for supplying us with an AMD R9 290 Tri-X graphics card, which we reviewed here. ASUS for supplying us with an RT-AC68U wireless AC gigabit router, which we reviewed here. Patriot for supplying us with a Wildfire 120GB solid state drive, which we reviewed here. Lian Li for supplying us with a PC-T60A test bench. Noctua for supplying us with NT-H1 thermal compound. Rosewill for supplying us with an Infrared thermometer. Test System Motherboard: varies by review CPU: Intel Core i7 4770K processor GPU: Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X graphics card RAM: Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB 2400MHz kit (CL11, 2 x 8GB) Cooling: Corsair H100i with Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Compound Case: Lian Li PC-T60A test bench Storage Drives: Kingston 240GB Hyper X 3K SSD, Patriot 120GB Wildfire SSD, Kingston Hyper X 64GB USB 3.0 flash drive and Plextor 256GB M6e M.2 SSD PSU: Be Quiet Straight Power E9 680W Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit SP1 Networking: ASUS RT-AC68U router Test Software SiSoft Sandra Engineer - available here. WPrime - available here. Cinebench - available here. 3DMark - available here. Bioshock Infinite - available here. Tomb Raider - available here. AIDA 64 Engineer - available here. DPC Latency Analyser - available here. Rightmark Audio Analyser - available here. LAN Speed Test Lite - available here. Passmark - available here. BIOS On entering Gigabyte’s BIOS you’re greeted with a splash screen which has a few key sections that you can see below. If you click the small grey bar on the left it takes you into the new style UEFI BIOS, the bar on the right takes you into the old style BIOS. You can also get to those by clicking on the two icons near the time at the top, the HD icon is for the new BIOS and the dual bar icon is for the old style BIOS. In the UEFI BIOS we are greeted with a fairly familiar layout that has been on previous Gigabyte motherboards from the Z87 series. This is by no means a bad thing as this UEFI is a very good design. You can see all the major tabs below. Upon entering the other BIOS we get the older more traditional Gigabyte BIOS. Gigabyte are really offering this for people who are more familiar or comfortable with that old style BIOS, if you don’t want to use it then you certainly do not have to. 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. Overclocking Despite having a fairly low-end 4 phase VRM we found overclocking to be just like any other Z87 or Z97 motherboard. We were able to reach our chip's maximum with minimal fuss and 1.275 volts. The voltage appeared to be stable with no noticeable droop like has been seen on some competitor motherboards with Z97. CPU Performance Cinebench CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's CPU performance. Cinebench R15 is a totally free utility and is available for download here. WPrime wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions. wPrime is a free utility that is available for download here. SiSoft Sandra The SiSoft Sandra Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks are widely used measures of compute power and performance for a wide array of real world usage scenarios. You can find out more details on these tests here or download SiSoft Sandra here. GPU Performance 3DMark 3DMark Firestrike is Futuremark's latest creation for testing the GPU performance of high end gaming PCs using Direct X 11 graphics. You can download a free basic version of 3DMark here. Tomb Raider Tomb Raider is a popular action-adventure video game published by Square Enix based on the Tomb Raider franchise. The game was released in 2013 and as of March 2014 had sold 6 million copies. Bioshock Infinite Bioshock Infinite is a first person shooter developed by Irrational Games that is the third instalment of the Bioshock series. The game is the last to be produced by Irrational Games before they announced their closure in February 2014. The game has sold over 4 million copies since its 2013 release. Memory Performance For our memory tests we use the built in memory benchmarks in AIDA64 Engineer and SiSoft Sandra. For more details on each of the benchmarks please see here and here respectively. AIDA64 Engineer SiSoft Sandra Combined Latency Test SATA, M.2 and USB Performance To test the storage performance in our motherboard reviews we use AIDA's Disk Benchmark utility built into their AIDA64 Engineer Edition software package and run a variety of read and write tests. We run each of the benchmark tests on a SATA III, USB 3.0 and M.2 device. For SATA III testing we use a Patriot WildFire 120GB SATA III SSD, for USB 3.0 testing we use the Kingston Hyper X 64 GB USB 3.0 flash drive and for M.2 testing we use Plextor's 256GB M.2 M6e SSD. The drives are always formatted before use. Linear Read Linear Write Random Read Random Write Networking Performance For our networking tests we connect the test system up to our Intel Gigabit enabled ASUS Rampage IV Extreme X79 motherboard test system through the ASUS RT-AC68U router and run our tests. We opted for this over a direct point-to-point connection because we wanted to simulate real world performance. For our WiFi tests we do the same except we connect the test system to the ASUS RT-AC68U router via WiFi at a distance of 2 metres from the router. LAN Speed Test Lite LAN Speed Test was designed from the ground up to be a simple but powerful tool for measuring file transfer, hard drive, USB Drive, and Local Area Network (LAN) speeds (wired & wireless). It does this by building a file in memory, then transfers it both ways (without effects of windows file caching) while keeping track of the time. Download the free Lan Speed Test Lite utility from here. Passmark Performance Test 8 The PassMark Advanced Network Test (which is part of PerformanceTest) is designed to test the data transfer rate between two computers both of which must be running PerformanceTest. One of the computers must act as the server and will sit waiting for a connection. The other computer acts as a client. It connects to the server machine and sends data to it for the duration of the test. You can download a trial version of PerformanceTest from here. Audio Performance RightMark Audio Analyser (RMAA) RMAA suite is designed for testing quality of analog and digital paths of any audio device. The results are obtained by playing and recording test signals passed through the tested audio path by means of frequency analysis algorithms. A more common mark is also provided for those unfamiliar with measured technical parameters. Available here. We run the RMAA test using a 3.5mm to 3.5mm cable connecting the line out to the line in to test the quality of the motherboard audio codec not any external audio devices. We run the complete playback and recording test at default settings and then get RMAA to interpret the results giving the below outputs. We sync the playback and recording audio devices to the same setting as the test for accurate results. 16 Bit, 48KHz (DVD Quality) 16 Bit, 96KHz (Studio Quality) 16 Bit, 192KHz (Studio Quality) DPC Latency Analyser Thesycon’s DPC Latency Checker is a Windows tool that analyses the capabilities of a computer system to handle real-time data streams properly. It may help to find the cause for interruptions in real-time audio and video streams, also known as drop-outs. Available here. Power Consumption and Thermals Power Consumption To measure power consumption we use a killawatt meter and measure the total system power draw at the wall. We run three different use-case scenarios for 5 minutes and take the average reading. Thermal Performance To measure the thermal properties of each motherboard we take the temperature of three different locations using a Rosewill infrared thermometer. We measure the hottest point on the PCH (chipset) heatsink, the first VRM heatsink (which is closest to the rear I/O) and the second VRM heatsink (which is closest to the RAM lanes). The graphs are sorted by the first VRM Heatsink temperature as this is normally where most of the CPU VRM phases reside. Final Thoughts Pricing Gigabyte's Z97MX-Gaming 5 motherboard costs $129.99 at Newegg and $129.99 at Amazon. In the UK it can be found for £113.26 on Amazon, £119.99 on Overclockers UK and £111.56 on Scan. This product is offered with a three year manufacturer warranty. Pricing and warranty details are accurate as of the time of writing. Overview As it stands the Z97 market doesn't have much in the way of mATX competition. Many of the mATX motherboards offered by rival brands at a similar price point lack certain features that this board has: e.g. the MSI Z97M Gaming lacks SATA Express or the ASUS Z97M-PLUS lacks SATA Express and offers less flexible PCIe connectivity. Gigabyte's Z97MX-Gaming 5 does a good job of offering a more comprehensive assortment of features at a compelling price point making it a sensible choice and a good all-rounder. From our benchmarks it has been clear that this is not the highest end motherboard available, many other (more expensive) motherboards have better performance in certain areas. However, we have to note that for the size and the price point the performance is certainly as good as I would expect and it offers more than enough performance for anyone looking to build on the Z97 platform. A lot of the things I had to say about the Z97X-Gaming 7 Gigabyte motherboard also apply to this motherboard since it is effectively the same but just a bit smaller, Gigabyte have kept a lot of their design principals consistent across the entire G1 Gaming series. The Gigabyte Z97MX-Gaming 5 offers a good balance of performance, features, size and price. Gigabyte's successes last year with enthusiast Z87 motherboards, especially here in the UK, are likely to continue with quality motherboards like this one. Pros Competitive pricing M.2 and SATA Express Dual BIOS chips and systems 3 year warranty Audio gain switches Killer NIC Cons Brown PCB Loosely secured motherboard heatsinks High CPU usage on Killer NIC Neutral Audio quality seems a little low for the codec used but is still relatively excellent "Gigabyte's Z97MX-Gaming 5 stands out in the market with its feature packed design and excellent pricing. As far as micro-ATX motherboards on the Z97 platform go this motherboard has to be a strong contender for anyone looking to build a compact rig." Thank you to Gigabyte for providing this review sample.