As its name suggests, this Gigabyte board is designed for keen gamers, and that means it has a keen sense of style. The PCB is mostly black, with red and white accents used on its heatsinks, and it has great-looking red LEDs along the left-hand edge and on the chipset heatsink. It will certainly stand out through a case window.
It has the grunt to support powerful graphics configurations as well. Two of its 16x PCI-E slots can run at their full speed when occupied, and it can run a further two slots if you’re happy to settle for 8x speed – ideal for quad-card setups and, unlike the MSI boards, it can accommodate four dual-slot graphics cards too. There are three 1x PCI-E slots too, which is more than any rival on test.
The storage configuration is impressive as well. The Gigabyte is one of only two boards on test that has two M.2 connectors, and it’s almost £100 cheaper than the EVGA. These connectors are both nestled among the expansion slots, with one Socket 3 connector for storage and a Socket 1 version for a Wi-Fi card. There are ten SATA 6Gbps ports too, and a SATA Express connector, although two SATA ports will be disabled if the M.2 slot is used.
In other areas, though, the Gigabyte doesn’t offer the versatility of competitors. It lacks a secondary CPU power socket, on-board power or reset buttons or a POST display. The layout isn’t the best either. The CPU socket, as with some other boards on test, is crowded enough to make installation of large air coolers tricky, and the pair of CPU fan connectors are in the middle of the board rather than at the top edge, which could prove awkward with water coolers. Most of the other connectors are placed sensibly around the right-hand edge, but most aren’t right-angled. There’s nothing special about the I/O panel either, with two PS/2 ports, six USB 3 ports and five audio jacks.
Also, the EFI doesn’t have as many settings as rivals, and some of them are tricky to find. The vcore has a comparatively low 1.7V limit too, although that’s more than high enough to push a Haswell-E chip to its limits – only extreme overclockers could be bothered.
Sadly, though, the Gigabyte’s main problem was performance. It sat at the bottom of the pile in every one of our new application tests, as well as Cinebench, and its overall score of 150,130 was almost 9,000 points behind the class-leading MSI X99S Gaming 7. This board is aimed at gamers, but it failed to impress in Shogun 2. Its 30fps stock speed minimum and 36fps average were the slowest on test – both honours it shares with the EVGA.
The Gigabyte suffered from the same frequency issues as the EVGA too – it only hit a Turbo peak of 3.3GHz, and its TJ Max of 89°C is low compared with rivals. These issues explain the poor stock speed showing. As with most of this month’s boards, we could only overclock our i7-5960X to a stable 4.2GHz with the Gigabyte too, though it only required a 1.25V vcore to hit this point, which is reasonable – only the EVGA demanded less juice.
The 4.2GHz overclock didn’t improve the Gigabyte’s fortunes though. It still propped up the results tables in every benchmark, and we often noticed comparatively significant gaps appearing between the Gigabyte and the rest of the field.
The Gigabyte is a good-looking board, but it isn’t good enough to succeed in other areas. It lacks enthusiast features that are included on similarly priced rivals such as the MSI X99S Gaming 7, and its speed is disappointing. In this price bracket, the MSI X99S Gaming 7 is an all-round better buy. MIKE JENNINGS
VERDICT
Good storage and graphics options, but let down by disappointing performance.
SPECIFICATIONS
Chipset Intel X99
CPU socket Intel LGA2011-v3
Memory support 8 slots: max 64GB DDR4 (up to 3,000Hz overclocked)
Expansion slots Four 16x PCI-E 3, three 1x PCI-E 3
Sound Creative 8-channel
Networking 1 x Killer E2201 Gigabit LAN
Overclocking Base clock 80–133.33MHz, CPU Multiplier 12-80x; max voltages, CPU 1.7V, RAM 2V
Ports 10 x SATA 6Gbps (X99), 1 x M.2, 1 x SATA Express, 6 x USB 3, 4 x USB 2, 1 x LAN, 3 x audio out, line-in, mic, 2 x PS/2, 1 x optical S/PDIF
Dimensions (mm) 305 x 244