Not only has every motherboard
manufacturer suddenly decided that the only way to properly denote an
enthusiast-class board is to give it a red and black livery, they’ve also
started using identical names.
MSI started off the ‘Gaming’ trend,
giving some of its 8-series boards the ‘Gaming’ moniker and now Gigabyte has followed
suit. They’ve also both gone for the same numerical identifiers. Just so we’re
all on the same page, this Gaming 5 motherboard is very different to the Gaming
5 motherboard we checked out last issue.
Well, I say ‘different’, but
they’re both sporting the latest Intel Z97 chipset, so they’re ready to rock
the latest Devil’s Canyon Haswell update. Yet while the MSI is a standard ATX
Z97, this Gigabyte version is a mini-ITX. So that’s where I’ll stop comparing
the two Gaming 5 boards.
A more telling comparison for
Gigabyte’s mini-ITX board is the ASRock Z97E-ITX/ac we reviewed last issue.
They both have the top chipset and are similarly priced, but seem to targeting
slightly different audiences. The ASRock board is very much all-purpose,aiming
to be all things to all users, while this Gigabyte board is holding the gamer
as its target. You can tell ‘cause it’s red and black.
Performance-wise it has the edge
over the ASRock board, most importantly in our gaming benchmark. If it had
fallen behind the more general-purpose mini-iTX mobo there might have been
trouble. It’s a much better overclocker too; not in terms of overall clockspeed
– the ASRock achieves a respectable 4.5GHz against the Gaming 5’s 4.6GHz – but
the benchmark performance at the top speed puts clear air between them. Storage
performance is pretty similar, but the Gigabyte just about has the edge there
too.
So it’s all looking pretty good for the Gaming 5 then, but we have some slight
concerns about it. Chiefly, the fact that it makes no improvements whatsoever
on the Z87 aside from confirmed compatibility with Devil’s Canyon. However, the
PCIe-based M.2 and SATA Express are included in the ASRock mini-ITX Z97, but
this Gigabyte board lacks both.
We could understand avoiding the
SATA Express kludge, but M.2 is going to be a serious contender in the storage
space, especially when we get some NVMe-based SSDs taking advantage of the bandwidth
on offer. The Gaming 5 board almost line sup like a very expensive H97 mini-ITX
offering – it’s got overclocking and gaming performance but none of the
next-gen storage that really marks out the Z97 chipset as an enthusiast product.
The ASRock mini-ITX just seems
like the more sensible little Z97 board. It has everything that makes the Z97 chipset
a tantalising glimpse into the future, and can still deliver performance – even
in gaming – that’s competitive with the best out there. You can see the
difference in benchmarks, but you might struggle to see that difference in use.
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