Gaming Results
Next, some real world gaming tests. We played Battlefield 4 and Titanfall online, three sessions of 180 seconds each. We took the best performance overall. All in the same maps and game modes and with a ping of less than 30ms consistently on a GigaLan. We have included the video settings for each game and the Nvidia control panel was set to “Performance” using the slider.
Silk Road Team Death match, only the best will do!
Though the performance was good, we are seeing a drop below 60FPS, albeit once, solid all the way however
Next Titanfall
The results look a bit odd, but generally they are good. There is a drop below 35FPS but we didn’t notice it in any of the benchmarks. Apart from the drop in the last 20 seconds, the results are around 50FPS average.
Next we look at the memory bandwidth and GPU bandwidth. We ran AIDA64 Engineer version three times and took the best results for each metric. We used 16GB of the excellent Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR3 with no extra volts when overclocking.
The AIDA64 Engineers memory benchmarks are very good. We have noticed the Gigabyte GA-Z97N GAMING-5 does hold it’s own in memory performance.
Next, AIDA64 GPGPU and conclusion.
Gigabyte GA-Z97N GAMING-5 Motherboard Review
Package - 8.5
Performance - 9
Price - 9
Consumer Experience - 8.5
8.8
If push came to shove, we would chose the MSI Z97I GAMING AC Motherboard over the Gigabyte GA-Z97N GAMING-5, though mainly down to the BIOS and the FPS performance at times. The Gigabyte GA-Z97N GAMING-5 is currently 113.99 on Amazons UK site which is £25 cheaper than the MSI Z97I GAMING AC Motherboard, another plus point and good value for a top of the line mITX gaming motherboard.