Gigabyte GA-Z97N GAMING-5 Motherboard Review

AIDA64 GPGPU performance is right on the money for this specification of motherboard and set up.

Single and double precision FLOPS are in the correct ball park, not a stellar performer but solid enough.

Again, no issues here, a good performance in the synthetic tests.

Conclusion

Micro ITX motherboards have reached maturity, and have been this way for about two years. This is good news for us all, we can enjoy a good feature set and support for high graphics performance in a small but mighty rig. We have no real issues with the Gigabyte GA-Z97N GAMING-5 Motherboard, it’s showing some very convincing performance, looks good and isn’t too expensive.

We didn’t test the LAN or Wi-Fi capabilities as we have done with other motherboard reviews, we found results too specific to our office environment, especially for Wi-Fi.

As gamers, we are happy Gigabyte include the Killer™ E2200 gaming networking controller, if for no other reason that bragging rights, and to put our latency woes to bed. We didn’t like the Wi-Fi set up, having no BIOS option, what we could find, to turn off the Wi-Fi, is a bit of a pain. Though we can uninstall the M.2 card, tricky once installed in a chassis though.

We found the Gigabyte GA-Z97N GAMING-5 Motherboard to be an excellent memory and SATA performer, and it wasn’t too bad at graphics, though it just felt a little underwhelming sometimes when it comes to FPS.

We didn’t like the BIOS, it’s not the nicest colour scheme and it’s generally not a nice place to be compared to many rivals. It does get marked down for this in the consumer experience rating, we hope for more from Gigabyte.

Gigabyte GA-Z97N GAMING-5 Motherboard