Gigabyte Z97N-Gaming 5 (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review

Software Overview

Gigabyte’s software has started to grate on me a little having used and installed it so many times since the first Gigabyte Z97 board I tested 5 months ago. The main issue for me is the way there are so many different applications that lack any sort of unity. Sure the applications are unified in their access through the App Center but App Center is more like a shortcut widget, rather than an actual program. It simply acts as a dashboard to launching each Gigabyte utility as a separate executable program. To state the obvious, this means you can run every single Gigabyte utility at the same time. That in itself isn’t bad, but the way Gigabyte implement it all makes for a fragmented user experience – especially when the App Center refuses to launch, which does happen quite frequently. When that happens you have to go through the Gigabyte folder where you installed it and work out which exe is for the utility you wanted to launch. I might also point out that on the Gigabyte website the software listed for this motherboard is endless, to the point where it puts you off using any software at all – it’s just too much to get your head around. I like the features and what is on offer with Gigabyte’s software, just the way they’ve implemented it doesn’t do it justice. The user experience ends up feeling sluggish and fragmented when it shouldn’t. I would like to see Gigabyte revamp their software significantly in a number of ways:

• Firstly, a clearly labelled and distributed unified installer for all their different software utilities that they produce themselves. External third party software and drivers can be left out.
• Secondly, a unified user interface which integrates all the Gigabyte utilities into a single executable program, that way users can access everything in one place and do not need to have as many 12 separate windows open at any one time

For an overview of what all the key Gigabyte utilities do you can see our software overview from a previous motherboard review, located here, where we discussed these things.