Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 5 (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review

Introduction, Specifications and Packaging Intel's Z97 platform feels like it has been here forever; since its official launch in early May 2014 we've ploughed through a sizeable 13 Z97 motherboard reviews here at eTeknix. Yet in the grand-scheme of things that 5 months is barely any time at all:the average PC user will tend to abide to a 2-3 year upgrade cycle meaning they'll sit through about three new Intel platform launches before choosing to upgrade. With that said Z97 is still as relevant to the PC user today as it was 5 months ago even if Z97 has lost some of its "latest & greatest" status with the recent launch of X99. Today we are examining Z97 motherboard number 14 courtesy of Gigabyte: we have their Z97X-Gaming 5 motherboard in for review. There is nothing particularly exciting or innovative going on with the Gigabyte Z97X Gaming 5 if I'm being totally honest. That isn't necessarily a bad thing because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" as the old saying goes. We have a very familiar red & black colour scheme which predictably gives this motherboard its "Gaming" denotation. Being a gaming board we also find this motherboard adheres to the usual high quality audio and networking package which makes use of Realtek's latest and greatest ALC 1150 codec and Qualcomm's Killer E2201 networking chip. The fact that the Z97X Gaming 5 is based on Intel's Z97 chipset means we also get all of the new desktop storage interfaces: M.2 and SATA Express, in addition to the tried and trusted SATA III. I won't pretend you can't get these specifications anywhere else: ASRock and MSI offer very similar motherboards with virtually identical hardware configurations. The real question is: why should you choose Gigabyte? The simple answer is because of the value for money proposition and the fact Gigabyte do offer some unique features of their own such as their patented dualBIOS and Amp-Up audio package: but we'll get onto all this later on in the review. Packaging and Accessories The Gigabyte Z97X Gaming 5 is a budget board in the wider Z97 market, it starts at £105/$145, so we aren't surprised to see a modest accessory bundle. Included is the usual documentation, a utility DVD, four SATA cables, a case sticker and an I/O shield which didn't come with our review sample. An I/O shield does come with the standard retail version and is identical to the I/O shield used with the Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 7 for those who are interested. A Closer Look & Layout Analysis The Z97X-Gaming 7 is an aesthetically safe motherboard that is hugely similar to all other Z97 motherboards in layout. We find the SATA Express and SATA located by the chipset heatsink, the M.2 slot at the start of the PCIe lanes and the audio located on an isolated PCB. Gigabyte helpfully label all of the SATA ports so you can work out which one does what. The audio codec, capacitors and front panel connector all get space on an isolated PCB which is under-lit by red LEDs. At the top of the board we find two CPU fan headers helpfully located next to each other (unlike MSI who like to space them out). Around the CPU socket we find the 8 phase VRM which makes use of 10K rated black capacitors provided by Nippon Chemi-Con and Nichicon. These capacitors feature a solid state design and reduced ESR. At the bottom of the board we can find the USB headers, two fan headers and the front panel I/Os. The PCIe lane config allows for 2-Way SLI or 3-Way CFX. The rear I/O is well decked out for USB and audio as well as for users looking to use the integrated graphics on their LGA 1150 CPU. Legacy mouse and keyboard connectivity is also something I like, although a combo port is preferred to make space for an extra two USB. The PCB is a custom matte black for a clean finish. 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. Test System Motherboard: varies by review CPU: Intel Core i7 4770K processor (Turbo disabled @ stock) GPU: Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X graphics card RAM: 8GB 2400MHz dual-channel kit (11-13-13-31-2T, 2 x 4GB) 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 and Overclocking Gigabyte's BIOS always enters you straight into the splashscreen from which you can pick from key tiles or select which BIOS you want. Gigabyte use their "DualBIOS" design which means you can pick from a visually attractive UEFI option or a more traditional AMI legacy BIOS. In the UEFI we find a full HD, 1920 x 1080, display which gives you lots of information to help you visualise your system. Below you can see our overclock settings where we simply dial in a 48x multiplier and 1.3 core voltage: we've extensively tested our i7 4770K and know what this CPU is limited to on our test system. The legacy style BIOS is what I personally prefer, I feel more at home here but each to their own. At least Gigabyte give you the choice to pick between the two competing styles. Overclocking As already mentioned the CPU managed 4.8GHz at 1.3v core voltage: this is a CPU limitation. For those who don't know, Haswell and Haswell Refresh overclocking on the LGA 1150 platform is largely limited by the CPU due to the onboard VRM controls. 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 that 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 the 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 have 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 of 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 of 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 as 12 separate windows open at any one time For an overview of what all of the key Gigabyte utilities do you can see our software overview from a previous motherboard review, located here, where we discuss these things. 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. Gigabyte's Z97X Gaming 5 sits in the middle for CPU performance. 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. In WPrime it falls a little further back, probably due to the WPrime tendency to favour memory as well as CPU performance. 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. In Sandra's arithmetic tests the Gigabyte board is back into the middle of the pack. 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. In 3DMark we find the Gigabyte board trailing the pack but not by much. 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. At Tomb Raider it leads the pack at stock and overclocked, albeit by less than 1 FPS which could be down to random margin of error. 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. Bioshock Infinite reveals some fairly unintelligible results. The simplest message to take from this is that the motherboard makes virtually no difference to gaming performance, and neither does the CPU overclock when you only have a single GPU. 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 Memory performance is where Gigabyte trail the competition a little. ASUS always exceed here but thankfully the synthetic memory results have minimal impact in real world applications. SiSoft Sandra Sisoft's memory test reveals some fairly mediocre results for the Z97X Gaming 5, although the margin of difference between the best and worst board is insignificant. Combined Latency Test Latency is an area where Gigabyte Z97 boards seem to fare a little better than the competition, the Z97X Gaming 5 does well because of this. 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 linear 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 Read and write performance is fairly close across all Z97 motherboards, since Gigabyte's F5 BIOS update we did see a little jump in M.2 performance which is nice. 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. The Gaming 5 and Gaming 7 boards are identical in the networking department based on these results. 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. And these ones look pretty identical too! 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, 44KHz (DVD Quality) 16 Bit, 96KHz (Studio Quality) 24 Bit, 96KHz (Studio Quality) By hardware design any Realtek ALC 1150 based motherboard will have strong audio, but Gigabyte's Z97X-Gaming 5 had particularly strong audio. On paper these results can easily rival some discrete audio solutions. The fact Gigabyte also equip an audio amplifier was notable in our testing, we only needed 44-45 system volume on each channel compared to the normal 65-70 that is required to satisfy the Rightmark test. I will also note that Gigabyte provide some Sound Blaster X-Fi MB3 software for additional audio feature enhancements if that is desired by the end-user. 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. Latency has been improved greatly on all Z97 motherboards since launch and the Gaming 5 shows that. Anything below about 500-1000 is going to deliver a seamless audiovisual experience so all Z97 motherboards perform great. Power Consumption 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. Power consumption was on the low side, especially at idle. We are not sure why this was the case but we can't complain as less power consumption means lower electric bills. Final Thoughts Pricing Gigabyte's Z97X Gaming 5 motherboard retails for $144.99 at Amazon and Newegg in the USA, and £109.99 at Overclockers here in the UK. Gigabyte provide a 4 year warranty with this product in the UK and Ireland, in other regions a 3 year warranty is provided. Summary Performance across the Intel Z97 motherboard stack is hugely similar, something that should have become crystal clear from our Z97 reviews here at eTeknix. In the CPU & GPU department there is no significant difference at all, while in the memory department there is a little difference on the synthetic side but this doesn't translate into the real world. Furthermore, even audio and networking performance are converging to similarity across all motherboard vendors. In the past audio and networking had been a point of differentiation but now all vendors are choosing similar NICs and audio codecs, even identical capacitors for the audio [and VRM on a side-note), meaning it is becoming harder for the end-user to answer the question: which motherboard should I buy? With all that said it thus comes down to two key things when deciding which motherboard to buy: value for money and features. Gigabyte's Z97X-Gaming 5 is a clear winner in the value for money department and is among the cheapest Z97 "Gaming" motherboards out. Even more impressive when you consider the black PCB, advanced audio & networking and total Z97 storage package of M.2 and SATA Express. The software didn't inspire me hugely, which is one of those extra features that counts for more than it used to, but what Gigabyte offer is still better than the likes of ASRock, Biostar and ECS. Though I still hope Gigabyte take some of my constructive criticisms about their software onboard (excuse the pun) because it can be so much better. Gigabyte make up for the fairly uninspiring software with their brilliant dualBIOS, which is one of my preferred BIOS offerings for Z97. In terms of extra or innovative features I find the Z97X-Gaming 5 is lacking: there's nothing that sets this significantly apart from what ASRock and MSI offer if you factor pricing and aesthetics out of the equation. However, pricing and aesthetics matter. There's no disagreeing with the fact that the Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 5 is a great value for money motherboard. For the more value conscious user this is a great choice for any Z97 build. For someone looking for something with more innovation, more extras...more "stuff", then you're simply going to have to spend more money. I'm sorry, that's just the way it is. Pros Excellent value for money Killer NIC High spec audio Has all the new storage standards 4 year warranty for UK buyers Excellent DualBIOS functionality Black PCB High quality VRM Cons Lack of innovative features Fragmented software Tired red & black gaming branding "Out of this world the Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 5 is not, but there's no reason you shouldn't be bringing this into your world. With competitive pricing and a great hardware spec the Gaming 5 is a rock-solid choice for a budget-conscious Gaming PC." Thank you to Gigabyte for providing this review sample.