GIGABYTE GA-Z97N-WIFI LGA 1150 Motherboard Review @ [H]

GIGABYTE GA-Z97N-WIFI LGA 1150 Motherboard Review - GIGABYTE’s Z97N WiFi has a lot to offer small form factor PC enthusiasts. Many hardware enthusiasts have gravitated to the "less is more" approach over the years, but it is easier now than ever. GIGABYTE's latest SFF offering proves good things come in small packages and it won't break the bank.

seems like this lil beast heats up quite a bit.

Wonder if this is a new replacement for the hackintosh builds over on TonyMac's site

Yeah heat is a little bit of an issue that I noticed as I used this board in my wife's build. Overall it is a nice solid board though.

Is there a 3rd party solution for cooling those MOSFETs? I'm not aware of those but I remember when it was usual to buy adhesive heatsinks for GPU RAM modules.

It seems that's the only serious issue (in the long term) of this board. If a <$20 solution is available I'd say this would a great purchase!

I love my mITX build, except it needs more holes in the case... gets pretty hot even with the AIO water cooler.

I have built a ton of office PCs in the last year using this little motherboard.

The board has all the features you want, is very stable at stock, has great WIFI connectivity and the build has a very small footprint.

When I bought mine they were right at 110 dollars after MIRs.

Nice review, I may have to pick one of these up for my small box.

These days fewer and fewer motherboards offer two wired NICs and I can’t figure out why GIGABYTE felt that was necessary.

I would posit that some of Gigabyte's designs are done with the idea of selling them to appliance builders, who need dual-NICs for something akin to a pfsense or Untangle solution. Of course, most of us would prefer Intel NICs for such a solution.

That said, if I were a board designer, I'd probably go with an H81 chipset since there's no need for overclocking in those solutions. This seems like an oddly-positioned board; halfway in between enthusiast (Z97 chipset, plenty of SATA ports, Wifi) and mainstream business (basic power phase design, no Realtek 1150 audio, Realtek NICs), can't decide what it wants to be.

I like Gigabyte, but for an enthusiast ITX board, ASUS seems to have much nicer enthusiast choices.

Why are the temperatures listed in Fahrenheit when everyone uses Celsius?

Anyone using a Corsair AIO cooler with this mobo? I installed a Corsair H60 on it but it seems to be touching the caps around the cpu socket and not getting proper contact so my temps on my Pentium g3258 are in the 70s at stock. I don't have a whole lot of options as to how to mount it, but I'm going to try rotating it.

that concerns me as I need to mount h60 or kraken onto that board. did you try to put some heatsink at the voltage hardware?