on the surface this motherboard appears to suffer from a bit of an identity
crisis Gigabyte couldn't figure out how to Brand the thing it carries their
traditional mainstream board Ultra durable branding their G1 gaming
branding and like Black Edition in huge letters in the middle of the Box what
the heck is this
thing with its Factory tuning and data center DNA an Intel 730 series SSD is
amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts all right so
apparently I wasn't tall enough during the intro and Brandon gave me another
Apple box to stand off on thanks for that Brandon the answer is all of the
above this is by a considerable margin gigaby highest in z97 motherboard but
before we get into that let's cover the accessories shall we in the Box you will
find two-way three-way and four-way SLI Bridges yes the board uses a plx hub to
give it quad Crossfire and SLI support a crossfire Bridge an IO Shield a wireless
AC and Bluetooth combo PCIe card as well
as an internal connector and antenna to go with that six braided SATA cables
half with straight and half with angled connectors and finally a 3 and 1/2 in
front USB module for your USB 3 in case your case doesn't have that all right
and I guess there's also a manual stickers and a driver disc in there too
on the board itself we'll kick things off with Aesthetics where Gigabyte has
moved away from the green color scheme and guns and bullets branding elements
towards a more subdued black gray and red color scheme that some will find
attractive but others myself included will find uninspired in copycat I mean a
red and black gaming motherboard we've never seen that before but you can
hardly blame them for going with what obviously works right along with the
more subdued practical looks comes a more subdued practical design you won't
find any extra CPU power inputs and
instead of an overbuilt 300 phase power
design it's got a simple yet robust All Digital 8-phase CPU power design that is
built for longevity rather than bling notable inclusions are the 10K black
capacitors rated at 10,000 hours at 105°
C and the 168 hour testing procedure
that each and every one of these motherboards will go through before it
makes it to your hands better QC is the
kind of thing I don't mind paying more for especially given how little there is
to differentiate one motherboard from another of these days the fan on the vrm
heat sink from the Z87 equivalent is gone replaced by beefier or passive heat
sinks but liquid cooling is still an option and Gigabyte has actually
improved the flexibility of their solution significantly by providing G1
quarter threaded holes instead of integrated barbs another thumbs up there
CPU support is dictated by the LJ 1150 socket in Gigabyte figures you won't
have any difficulty with a last generation Haswell chip a Haswell
refresh code name Devil's Canyon chip or even an upcoming Broadwell process
processor so z97 looks like a solid option for someone planning to build a
system now then upgrade when Intel rolls out their new CPUs officially we've got
dual Channel DDR3 RAM support up to 3200
MHz but it should be noted that on hasbell CPUs maximum RAM frequency
decreases as CPU frequency increases with overclocking so it's not a huge
deal these days in the top right corner we'll find power reset and clear seimo
switches along with a debug LED and contact points for reading onboard
voltages with a multimeter rather than relying on soft Ware the 24 pin is in
its ideal location along the right hand edge of the board with front USB 3 and
an auxiliary SATA connector right beneath it make sure to plug that in if
you're using more than two graphics cards on the board further down things
get pretty interesting Gigabyte has added not one but two additional Marvel
controllers to give this board a total of 10 SATA 36 GB per second ports and
they've also implemented SATA Express which will consume two of the regular
Intel SATA 3 ports should you decide to use that once SSD that support this new
10 gbit standard become available at the bottom we find color-coded front panel
connectors and physical switches to decide which of the two BIOS chips you
want to use as well as whether you want to use dual BIOS at all although I'd
recommend leaving that on the PCI Express layout of this board is what I
would consider ideal not Everyone likes this spacing but here's why I like it
you've got lots of space between the 16x
slots here and here and you can cram four cards on the board all running in
adex mode if you really want to by having the bottom card hang down a
little bit and it does this without increasing the height of the board to an
XL ATX form factor Love It audio has
been a big Focus for Gigabyte since the beginning of the G1 series and it
continues to be one here they're using nichon audio grade capacitors a gold
shielded creative sound processor and a physically separated PCB in order to
improve performance and reduce interference they've also thrown in gain
adjustment switches for folks with difficult to drive headphones a
swappable opamp socket if you're into that sort of thing and goldplated
connectors on the back which won't improve audio quality but might help
with longevity somewhat now things have
gone really well for the layout of this board so far but Gigabyte bunged up the
fan connectors a little bit in my mind look at pretty much any Modern
Performance case and you'll see top mounted fans or at least mounts for them
Gigabyte hasn't got any fan headers on basically the top half of the board
they're here here here here here here and here which is perfect if your case
has all of the fans in the front and the bottom a rare occurrence it's not a huge
deal and fan extensions are cheap it's just something that I'd like to see
improved rear IO is a strong point for the board PS2 is there for those random
hardto diagnose issues the two USB 2.0 ports are Dack ports which supposedly
provide more stable power and are good for USB sound cards not sure why we'd
need two of those especially with the excellent onboard audio but I guess it
saves me the trouble of peering back there to make sure I'm using the right
one if I'm using a deck triple displays running DVI HDMI and DisplayPort are
supported off the onboard graphics and then we find six USB 3 ports 2 GB
Ethernet ports one Intel and one killer
e2205 Network chip that enables packet prioritization for your most important
applications this is a layout that I really like giving me the option of
Intel or the killer one and then finally goldplated 7.1 audio ports as well as an
optical audio port for good measure speaking of good measure I hope this
video gave you a pretty good measure of the awkwardly named gab z97x gaming G1
Wi-Fi BK Black Edition Uber clock I
don't know whatever anyway it includes everything but the kitchen sync Hardware
wise and even adds an updated easy UF ufi BIOS mode as well as a self-tuning
overclocking feature within Gigabyte easz tune software but more importantly
it adds more testing and validation so you're unlikely to end up with a lemon
this is the kind of thing I really value these days and it's great to see
Gigabyte raising the bar this way thanks for watching guys as usual the link to
the pricing and availability for this product is in the video description below the like dislike and share buttons
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