Introduction
Hi everyone, this time we’ll be reviewing the GIGABYTE GA-Z97X-Gaming 7 motherboard. The GIGABYTE GA-Z97X-Gaming 7 motherboard is made with the latest Intel Z97 chipset and targeted towards the mainstream to hardcore gamers as well as enthusiasts. It supports the latest Intel Haswell refresh series of CPUs and packs a lot of features.
Here is the link to the motherboard(GIGABYTE official site) : GIGABYTE GA-Z97X-Gaming 7 motherboard. This is a full sized ATX motherboard and features Killer E2200 LAN and Realtek ALC 1150 115 dB SNR audio for a complete gaming experience. Lets move on to the specs as shown on GIGABYTE website:
| CPU | Support for Intel® Core™ i7 processors/Intel® Core™ i5 processors/ Intel® Core™ i3 processors/Intel® Pentium® processors/ Intel® Celeron® processors in the LGA1150 package L3 cache varies with CPU (Please refer “CPU Support List” for more information.) |
| Chipset | Intel® Z97 Express Chipset |
| Memory | 4 x DDR3 DIMM sockets supporting up to 32 GB of system memory * Due to a Windows 32-bit operating system limitation, when more than 4 GB of physical memory is installed, the actual memory size displayed will be less than the size of the physical memory installed. Dual channel memory architecture Support for DDR3 3200(O.C.) / 3100(O.C.) / 3000(O.C.) / 2933(O.C.) / 2800(O.C.) / 2666(O.C.) / 2600(O.C.) / 2500(O.C.) / 2400(O.C.) / 2200(O.C.) / 2133(O.C.) / 2000(O.C.) / 1866(O.C.) / 1800(O.C.) / 1600 / 1333 MHz memory modules Support for non-ECC memory modules Support for Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) memory modules (Please refer “Memory Support List” for more information.) |
| Onboard Graphics | Integrated Graphics Processor: 1 x D-Sub port, supporting a maximum resolution of 1920×1200@60Hz 1 x DVI-D port, supporting a maximum resolution of 1920×1200@60Hz * The DVI-D port does not support D-Sub connection by adapter. 1 x HDMI port, supporting a maximum resolution of 4096×2160@24Hz or 2560×1600@60Hz * Support for HDMI 1.4a version. Support for up to 3 displays at the same time Maximum shared memory of 512MB |
| Audio | Realtek® ALC1150 codec Support for Sound Blaster X-Fi MB3 High Definition Audio 2/4/5.1/7.1-channel Support for S/PDIF Out |
| LAN | Qualcomm® Atheros Killer E2201 LAN chip (10/100/1000 Mbit) |
| Expansion Slots | 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x16 (PCIEX16) * For optimum performance, if only one PCI Express graphics card is to be installed, be sure to install it in the PCIEX16 slot. 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x8 (PCIEX8) 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x4 (PCIEX4) 3 x PCI Express x1 slots 1 x PCI slot |
| Multi-Graphics Technology | Support for 3-Way/2-Way AMD CrossFire™and 2-Way NVIDIA® SLI™ Technology |
| Storage Interface | Chipset: 1 x M.2 PCIe connector (Socket 3, M key, type 2242/2260/2280 SATA & PCIe SSD support) 1 x SATA Express connector 6 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors (SATA3 0~5) (M.2, SATA Express, and SATA3 4/5 connectors can only be used one at a time. The SATA3 4/5 connectors will become unavailable when an M.2 SSD is installed.) Support for RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10 Marvell® 88SE9172 chip: 2 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors (GSATA3 6~7) Support for RAID 0 and RAID 1 * Due to system limitation, Intel RAID and Marvell RAID can only use either one. |
| USB | Chipset: 6 x USB 3.0/2.0 ports (4 ports on the back panel, 2 ports available through the internal USB header) 8 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports (4 ports on the back panel, 4 ports available through the internal USB headers) |
| Internal I/O Connectors | 1 x 24-pin ATX main power connector 1 x 8-pin ATX 12V power connector 1 x PCIe power connector 1 x M.2 PCIe connector 1 x SATA Express connector 8 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors 1 x CPU fan header 1 x water cooling fan header (CPU_OPT) 4 x system fan headers 1 x front panel header 1 x front panel audio header 1 x S/PDIF Out header 1 x USB 3.0/2.0 header 2 x USB 2.0/1.1 headers 1 x serial port header 1 x Clear CMOS jumper 1 x Trusted Platform Module (TPM) header 1 x power button 1 x reset button 1 x Clear CMOS button 2 x BIOS switches Voltage measurement points |
| Back Panel Connectors | 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/O Controller | iTE® I/O Controller Chip |
| H/W Monitoring | System voltage detection CPU/Chipset/System temperature detection CPU/CPU OPT/System fan speed detection CPU/System overheating warning CPU/CPU OPT/System fan fail warning CPU/CPU OPT/System fan speed control * Whether the fan speed control function is supported will depend on the cooler you install. |
| BIOS | 2 x 128 Mbit flash Use of licensed AMI UEFI BIOS Support for DualBIOS™ PnP 1.0a, DMI 2.7, WfM 2.0, SM BIOS 2.7, ACPI 5.0 |
| Unique Features | Support for APP Center * Available applications in APP Center may differ by motherboard model. Supported functions of each application may also differ depending on motherboard specifications. @BIOS EasyTune EZ Setup Fast Boot Game Controller ON/OFF Charge Smart TimeLock Smart Recovery 2 System Information Viewer USB Blocker Support for Q-Flash Support for Smart Switch Support for Xpress Install |
| Bundle Software | Norton® Internet Security (OEM version) Intel® Rapid Start Technology Intel® Smart Connect Technology Intel® Smart Response Technology |
| Operating System | Support for Windows 8.1/8/7 |
| Form Factor | ATX Form Factor; 30.5cm x 24.4cm |
Unboxing and packaging
The box looks neat with a GIGABYTE Gaming series logo and the Intel® logos of the chipset and CPU support and has a good aesthetic appeal.
The back side has some special features explained and a brief spec of the board.
An ESD bag protects the board from static electricity.
Packaging was good. The accessories were well packed inside the box below the motherboard.
In box accessories:
Accessories were common and includes:
-
User manual and Installation guide booklets
Driver disc(not shown in picture)
Two stickers: Ultra Durable and G1 Gaming
Total 4 SATA 6 Gb/s cables
Back panel I/O shield
NVIDIA SLI™ bridge
Layout
The board:
The motherboard is based on the black and red theme as seen in GIGABYTE Gaming series motherboards.
The board was cleaned adequately. There was minimal solder residue(flux).
Back I/O ports:
The back panel features:
-
Two PS/2 ports supporting a keyboard and mouse
Four USB 2.0 ports
Four USB 3.0 ports
VGA, DVI and HDMI ports for video output
RJ-45 ethernet port
Six audio jacks for 8 channel audio support with support for optical S/PDIF output.
There are two plastic caps for protecting the onboard DVI and HDMI ports from dust and moisture. This is a good approach by GIGABYTE as I have often seen that leaving them unused causes corrosion in the ports.
Power connectors:
The board is powered using the standard 24 pin EATX and 8 pin EPS plugs.
Expansion capabilities
SATA ports:
The motherboard has a total of 8 SATA ports all at SATA 6 Gbps. 6 of them are from the Intel Z97 chipset. The remaining 2 is handled by a Marvell 88SE9172 chip which I will include in the technical section. One SATA Express port is included.
The board also has support for the latest M.2 slot having bandwidth of 10 Gbps. Please note that M.2 was formerly known as Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF).
PCI-E slots:
Top to bottom: PCIe 2.0 x1 slot 1, PCIe 2.0/3.0 x16 slot @x16, PCIe 2.0 x1 slot 2, PCIe 2.0 x1 slot 3, PCIe 2.0/3.0 x16 slot 2 @x8, PCI slot 1, PCIe 2.0/3.0 x16 slot 3 @x4.
The motherboard supports NVIDIA® SLI™ Technology and AMD CrossFireX™ Technology. Maximum dual GPU bandwidth is x8 + x8 mode. The bandwidth of PCIE slots are shared.
When the second PCIE x16 slot is populated, the first slot will operate at x8 mode.
When the last PCIE x16 slot is populated, the first slot will operate at x8 mode and the second at x4 mode.
RAM slots:
4 DIMM slots are provided supporting up to 32 GB of memory each memory module being 8 GB in size. The board supports memory overclocking up to 3200 MHz. Please note that this much overclock depends primarily on the capability of the CPU since the memory controller is integrated within the CPU. Additional cooling might be required.
Layout is very good. Every slot is placed as they should be and should not cause any issues.
Component analysis, Internal headers, Front panel headers, Switches
The Intel Z97 chipset lies underneath a red stylish heatsink. The logo is of the GIGABYTE Gaming series.
The heatsink is mounted by two screws behind the board.
The DRAM VRM is made with two 1R2 chokes along with coupled 8 pin flat lead package MOSFETs. Those MOSFETS are controlled by a Internal Rectifier 3570A controller and driven by a International Rectifier 3598 MOSFET driver. Also you get voltage test points in the board. Just hook up your multimeter and get voltages in realtime.
The CPU VRM section is built with an 8 phase design with a total of 8 chokes. The MOSFETs are cooled by the heatsinks. The heatsinks are red and black in color with silver colored GIGABYTE and G1 GAMING logo and are of good quality. Lets take them out and check what’s inside:
There are coupled MOSFETs(total eight pairs) for each power phase. However each MOSFET driver(International Rectifier model# 3598) drives 4 MOSFETs or simply two phases. That was done to cut down costs. So the VRM is okay to do the job but a very high voltage might cause instability.
The voltage controller is from International Rectifier and the model number 3563B. Capacitors are of premium quality.
The VRM heatsinks have thermal pads beneath them. They are of good quality.
So the VRM is adequate enough for a good overclock.
An ASM 1442K chip takes care of switching between the onboard display output ports.
There are on-board power, reset buttons. Additionally, a clear CMOS switch is given and BIOS switches. The BIOS_SW switch controls GIGABYTE’s patented Dual BIOS. The SB stands for single BIOS mode. That is useful if you need to flash the BIOS chips separately.
The Marvel 88SE9172 provides support for two additional SATA ports at 6 Gbps.
A two digit seven segment post code debug display is provided which is very useful. A front panel USB 3.0 header lies beside it and it is directly controlled by the Z97 Intel® chipset.
The UEFI/BIOS is stored in two 128 Mbit MX chips conforming GIGABYTE DualBIOS™ technology. It is not user replaceable however and is done to minimize footprint.
The switches for PCIe mode switching are from NXP and carry the model number L04083B.
There are photos of the fan headers. The front panel section consist of the conventional power, HDD LED, audio and USB headers. There is also support for SPDIF, a COM port and TPM header. I would have been happier if the fan headers were placed more strategically. The majority of the additional fan headers are at the bottom only.
CPU fan headers are placed at good locations and has support for two headers. One main and the other optional.
Nichicon premium Japanese-made capacitors are used for the audio filter.
The Audio IC is a Realtek ALC 1150 chip having Signal-to-Noise Ratio(SNR) of 115 dB. A metallic shield is given surrounding the IC for electric screening which prevents EMI(Electro-Magnetic Interference) of the board with the audio chip. The audio section is separated from the rest of the components of the board to isolate the audio from the interference of other components. Also the path way is lit up by red LEDs for the eye candy. You can also switch it off from the BIOS settings.
An ITE 8620E chip is used for Super I/O and monitoring.
An ITE 8892E chip provides support for legacy PCI ports. It actually converts PCIe signals to PCI(acts as a bridge).
The Ethernet support is provided with a Killer E2201 chip and offers good performance.
Notes: The CPU socket is very delicate. Install the CPU with utmost care to prevent damage to the socket. Do not touch the socket pins or the base of the CPU.
When opening the socket lever, just be careful of not scratching the board with the lever. This can be redesigned by using a plastic cap on the end of the lever and/or using a membrane on the surface of the board near the area.
BIOS/UEFI Walkthrough
The first screen is simple and an easy start screen where there are all the settings needed to configure your system for the OS you like to install.
Press F2 and you get the advanced menu. You will get all the settings in this mode.
M.I.T. stands for Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker. M.I.T. Current status as the name suggests shows all the clock settings.
Here are the overclocking related settings. Pretty much self explanatory.
Here are the voltage and power settings.
Hardware monitoring is included as standard.
You can configure fan speeds based on whether you prefer better cooling or less noise.
Here are the boot and secure boot settings.
The peripheral settings goes here. You can configure the on-board devices, USB ports and SATA ports.
I was really happy with the SATA settings as the BIOS allows you to disable or enable ports.
Press F2 again and you will have a mode which takes care of all your overclocking settings. I liked this.
Every possible tweaking option is there, all under one hood. See for yourself.
All voltage settings under one page, simplified!
And you get the provision for saving you overclock settings also for future use or testing purpose.
I must say, I liked the part of the BIOS completely dedicated to overclocking.
Overall, BIOS/UEFI is quite good and it has definitely improved than older GIGABYTE boards I saw before.
Benchmarks
Test system
CPU: Intel Core i5 4670K
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z97X-Gaming 7
RAMs: Kingston HyperX Blu DDR3 1600 MHz 9-9-9-27(2*4 GB)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Seidon 120V with push pull configuration
Graphics card: Sapphire Radeon HD 6770 1 GB DDR5
Hard disk(s): Seagate ST500DM002(primary) and Western Digital WD10EARS(storage)
Power Supply: Corsair GS 700 2013 edition
Monitor: Dell S2240M
Chassis: Open test bench table
Software: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Service Pack 1 and all updates till then.
OS Installation, benchmarks:
The OS installation went without any issues.The power profile was set to high performance mode to prevent power saving states triggering while benchmarks. Windows update was run and I made sure it was completely updated.
Please note that these benchmarks are not an absolute measure of the motherboard performance but a measure of the platform performance. Overclock potential however is a measure of the motherboard quality and performance.I don’t have much to tell here. We will compare scores at stock and overclocked conditions.
Testing methodology: CPU performance and memory performance were tested with well known benchmarking software such that scores can be compared also. Relative performance is shown at stock and overclocked settings and then compared. The benchmarks were run at least twice to verify the consistency
Benchmarks(stock performance):
Cinebench R11.5:
Scores 6.52 points.
Cinebench R15:
580 points.
AIDA CPU Queen:
AIDA CPU Photoworxx:
AIDA CPU AES:
AIDA cache and memory benchmark:
Super Pi 1.5, 32M:
wPrime 1.55, 1024M:
Benchmarks(overclocked performance):
CPU Clock : 4.7 GHz (47*100MHz), Voltage: 1.29V, VRIN = 2.05V
Memory clock 2400 MHz(24*100 MHz) DDR3 12-13-12-30 1T @ 1.65V
NB Clock : 4.4 GHz(44*100 MHz)
The CPU was a very good overclocker with respect to core clock. The IMC was also good and it had no issues handling the 1600 MHz RAMs at 2400 MHz with complete stable operation.
Validation: CPU-Z Validator 4.0
Cinebench R11.5:
It scores 8.06 points! That improved a lot. We will do an analysis after the benchmarks.
Cinebench R15:
719 points. That increased a lot!
AIDA CPU Queen:
AIDA CPU Photoworxx:
AIDA CPU AES:
AIDA cache and memory benchmark:
Memory bandwidth increased a lot and we can say that Intel platform performance scales very good with higher memory clocks.
Super Pi 1.5, 32M:
wPrime 1.55, 1024M:
Analysis:
Cinebench R11.5: Stock: 6.52, Overclocked: 8.06. Performance gain: 23.62%(approx)
AIDA CPU Queen: Stock: 36483, Overclocked: 45091. Performance gain: 23.59%(approx)
AIDA CPU Photoworxx: Stock: 15023, Overclocked: 21410. Performance gain: 42.51%(approx)
AIDA CPU AES: Stock: 16796, Overclocked: 20757. Performance gain: 23.58%(approx)
For the rest, there is appreciable difference and performance increases proportionately in all the benchmarks. Super Pi and WPrime benchmarks are also finished appreciably faster after overclock.
System performance is very good, lot of difference in stock and overclocked performance and especially, the memory bandwidth improved a lot after overclocking the memory and the NB.
Maximum overclock
Okay these are the maximum frequencies that I was able to achieve with the system. Please note that with these settings, the system was not 100% stable but stable enough for validating. Also note that every CPU/RAM is different and will overclock differently even if the model numbers are same.
Validation: CPU-Z Validator 4.0
I was very close to 5 GHz on the core but I could not get it stable to boot at that frequency.
Temperatures
There were no thermal issues faced with the system. The CPU temperatures were less than 70 degree C at maximum load at stock settings. Overclocking the CPU led that to be around 80 to 92 degree C. The chipset temperature stayed around 48 degree C.
Bundled software
Now that we have finished looking through the benchmarks, let us check out what bundled software GIGABYTE provides with this board.
GIGABYTE APP center is the core of most of the apps.
You can install the modules you like as per your choice.
USB blocker comes in handy when you are using the system in a public environment and want to restrict use of some specific USB device. Set up the password and you are ready.
EasyTune is the overclocking utility in Windows. You can change advanced paramenters also within Windows. Presets are provided as well to help beginners. Manually you get a lot of advanced options including voltage control.
Being a Gaming series motherboard, you get all these applications:
Game controller:
Killer LAN:
Also with the Audio drivers, you get support for Creative X-Fi MB3.
Summary and conclusion
Pros:
1. Good layout overall
2. SATA Express, M.2 support
3. Good build quality and choice of components
4. Good cleaning of the board
5. BIOS/UEFI interface features dedicated overclocking section only for overclocking.
6. Very good audio quality(real time), Creative X-Fi MB 3 support
7. Gold plated video and audio jacks
Cons:
1. Theoretically average CPU VRM
2. Fan headers are not strategically placed
3. Minor bugs in the BIOS in the dedicated overclocking section(can be fixed in a later BIOS revision)
Verdict:
GA-Z97X-Gaming 7
Thanks for reading. Hope you like it. Please share your opinions. Criticisms and suggestions are warmly welcome. Last but not the least, I would like to express my thanks to GIGABYTE India for providing me the sample.