Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 7 (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review

Introduction, Specifications and Packaging Intel's first Haswell Refresh CPUs have just been recently released, Intel's Devil's Canyon (unlocked K series Haswell Refresh) CPUs are expected in just a month or two and rumours going around suggest that Intel's Broadwell CPUs could even be released this year too - from an enthusiast perspective there has never been a better time to upgrade your motherboard to the latest chipset on the block - Z97. Today we are taking a closer look at our third Z97 motherboard courtesy of Gigabyte, more specifically it is their Z97X-Gaming 7 motherboard which is their top of the range Gaming Series motherboard, although they will have other more premium boards from their Ultra Durable and OC ranges but those aren't targeted specifically at gamers. For anyone used to the Gigabyte G1 Gaming series of motherboards you may be surprised by two obvious aesthetic changes. The first is the colour scheme has shifted from green and black to red and black. The second is that that G1 Series Bullets and Skulls have been replaced by the "Gigabyte Eye" typically seen on their VGA series products. For some this may be a great move by Gigabyte, moving towards the more desired and traditional "gaming" red and black colours, but for others it might be a bit frustrating to see ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI all offering red and black as the primary colour scheme on their gaming motherboards. What might be even more worrying is that MSI and Gigabyte both have Z97 gaming motherboard models dubbed "Gaming 7", which will no doubt serve to confuse consumers. In terms of the feature set we have the usual emphasis on high quality audio and networking which is pretty much the mainstay of the gaming motherboard scene. Additional features include multi-GPU support and the new storage connectivity supported by Intel's Z97 chipset. All the detailed specifications can be seen in the table below: Packaging and Accessories The packaging features Gigabyte's Eye as the show piece, the box looks very similar to what we might expect if we were unboxing a high end Gigabyte graphics card. The back introduces some of the key features in more detail, you can see all the details here at the product page. Included with the motherboard is some documentation and a driver/utility DVD. The accessories include a black and labelled rear I/O, a couple of Gigabyte stickers, 3 SATA III cables and an SLI cable. A Closer Look & Layout Analysis The Gigabyte Z97X Gaming 7 is a fairly attractive motherboard. I think the high end gamers might be disappointed with how "small" the heatsinks are - the board doesn't have a lot of bulk to it, but that can also play to its advantage in allowing it to be more affordable, more compact and more compatible with other hardware. On the layout front Gigabyte have made sensible choices all around, we have the 8 and 24 pin connectors in ideal locations, the storage connectors all in one place and right angled for better cable management and we've got two CPU fan headers placed right next to the CPU socket. I would have liked to have seen the front panel audio connector a little closer to the front of the board, the TPM and COM ports should be closer to the back because they are less likely to be used inside a standard case. I also think the USB 3.0 port should be swapped with the debug LED and made right angled to further improve cable management options. Gigabyte might also consider moving the memory banks further away from the CPU socket to allow for better RAM compatibility with CPU coolers. However, even with those minor improvements that could be made the overall layout in terms of PCI spacing, power connector placement and so on is fairly sensible. This board has a good layout, nothing offensively bad, but it could be slightly improved. The CPU socket has two modestly sized heatsinks and an 8 phase VRM supplemented with 10K rated durable black solid caps. For a flagship motherboard an 8 phase VRM is fairly "modest" but it isn't all about the quantity - the quality of the phases is just as important too and Gigabyte are pretty confident about their quality. As I have already briefly mentioned the RAM banks seem to be a little close to the CPU socket, there seems to be adequate space to move them a little. Down at this section of the board we can see BIOS switches, a power button, reset button, clear CMOS button, debug LED and dual fan headers - all great things to have on a motherboard. I think debug LEDs and onboard buttons aren't gamer-specific features, but they are of utility to everyone as at some stage most people will experience hardware problems. The addition of voltage read-off points is a bit of a strange one, I guess it is nice that they are there but I'm not sure many people will find them useful. Down by the newly designed PCH heatsink we find 8 SATA III 6gbps ports of which two are third party Marvell ports (the grey ones) and all the rest are provided by the Z97 chipset. Two of the SATA III ports from the Z97 chipset have to be sacrificed if you want to use a SATA Express device. It is also worth noting that you can use only the M.2 OR the SATA Express port, you cannot use both at the same time. There is also a supplementary SATA power if you need it for your graphics cards. Down at the bottom of the board we find two system fan headers, a COM port, TPM port, dual front panel USB 2.0 and the front panel connectors. Slightly further down there's an extra fan header and the front panel audio. Another system fan header is located slightly above the M.2 area. PCI(e) connectivity is fairly abundant and it is great to see dual slot spacing between the two main PCI Express lanes where you might install graphics cards. We see the usual separated PCB audio design at the back corner as well as the front panel audio headers which are here to reduce electrical interference from being located further up the board - which would be better for cable management but worse for audio quality. The audio section also contains Nichicon Japanese audio capacitors and EMI shielding over the main Realtek ALC1150 audio codec. We can also see the tiny little Killer E2201 chip which provides the Gigabit LAN for this board. The rear I/O contains the following ports: 1 x PS/2 mouse port 1 x PS/2 Keyboard 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 (Center/Subwoofer Speaker Out, Rear Speaker Out, Line In, Line Out, Mic In) I think dual PS/2 ports is a bit strange, I would have preferred one of them to be dropped and to get a PS/2 combo port with two extra USB ports instead. The motherboard uses a matte-black PCB. The CPU heatsinks aren't actually screwed in, they are just fastened by some plastic pop-in mechanisms. This would explain why they are so wobbly. This isn't the first Gigabyte motherboard where the CPU/VRM heatsinks have been loosely fitted - they really need to sort this out by screwing them in properly. 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. Upon entering 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 A new chipset doesn't bring anything new to overclocking because we're still CPU limited and we still have the same CPUs as Z87 - that's until Haswell Refresh K series CPUs (Devil's Canyon) arrive a bit later on this year. That said the Gigabyte Z97X Gaming 7's 8 phase CPU VRM was easily capable of reaching 4.8GHz which is the maximum our chip can achieve before it reaches thermal throttling on our H100i. The overclock we dialled in used 1.27 volts. 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. 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, 44KHz (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). Final Thoughts Pricing The Gigabyte Z97X Gaming 7 motherboard costs $179.99 at Amazon and $179.99 at Newegg in the USA. In the UK it costs £134.99 at Amazon, £139.99 at Overclockers UK and £131.99 at Scan Computers. The Gigabyte Z97X Gaming 7 comes with a four year Gigabyte warranty service Overview Gigabyte's Z97X Gaming 7 motherboard is a solid gaming motherboard at a very compelling price point. From a consumer standpoint it is hard to find much to quibble about considering the excellent bang for your buck this offers. Gigabyte's Z97X Gaming 7 is £5 cheaper than MSI equivalent, their Z97 Gaming 7 (£140), and just £20 more expensive than the ASUS Z97-A (£115), which is the ASUS entry level Z97 board, yet this Gigabyte Z97X Gaming 7 actually offers quite a lot more than both these motherboards. Gigabyte have really gone all out with the feature set - they include more storage options than anyone else at the price point, one of the best audio solutions for this price point and a class-leading warranty for the price point too. That's not even counting all the other extras this motherboard has like onboard power/reset/clearCMOS buttons, a debug LED, supplementary motherboard power for multi-GPU configurations, voltage read-off points and dual BIOSes in both senses (dual BIOS chips and dual BIOS systems: the "old" and "new" styles). Those features combined with the gamer-styling are sure to appeal to a rather large audience. However, from the enthusiast-perspective I think some users may be a little disappointed that Gigabyte have "caved in" to the generic red and black colour scheme when I think their green and black colour scheme had actually started to warm to a lot of people. Gigabyte's Z87 green boards were a fairly unique aesthetic to an increasingly homogenous motherboard market and were ideal for standing out from the crowd and building Nvidia themed systems. Now people looking for different colour gaming motherboards will have to opt for a rival brand, or get modding. I also feel like the use of the Killer NIC over the Intel NIC is not going to be welcomed by those higher end gamers. While in terms of raw throughput the Intel and Killer NICs are fairly similar, the Intel NIC imposes a dramatically smaller CPU overhead and comes with a much more mature software package - the Killer NIC software is actually quite intrusive and irritating in my honest opinion. Although it must be noted that the Killer NIC is a cheaper option and is part of what allows Gigabyte to bring this motherboard to market at such an attractive price point so it is an understandable decision they've made. A couple of other points I just want to touch on include the fact the CPU VRM heatsinks are not attached securely, Gigabyte should have opted for screws instead of a push-pin system. Second I think some layout aspects of the motherboard design could have been improved, to see the specifics of those possible improvements please refer back to page 2 of this review. Pros 4 year warranty Highly competitive price point "Safe" gamer aesthetics Killer NIC Dual BIOS chips and systems High quality audio Onboard buttons & debug LED Cons VRM heatsinks loosely secured Some aspects of the layout could be improved Killer NIC has fairly high CPU usage compared to Intel NICs Green/Black colour scheme has been replaced, Gigabyte's Gaming series no longer feels unique "Gigabyte's Z97X-Gaming 7 motherboard may no longer have the unique green aesthetics of that we come to associate with the Gigabyte G1 Series, but what it does have is a ridiculous number of features for such a competitive price point that other vendors cannot match. Gigabyte's Z97X-Gaming 7 is an excellent motherboard for any gaming system and with a 4 year warranty you know it is a piece of hardware that you can trust." Thank you to Gigabyte for providing this review sample.