GIGABYTE X99P-SLI LGA 2011v3 Motherboard Review @ [H]

[FrgMstr]

GIGABYTE X99P-SLI LGA 2011v3 Motherboard Review - GIGABYTE has put out a refreshed X99 motherboard offering an updated USB 3.1 controller and Thunderbolt compatibility. While Skylake is the new hotness and comprises the bulk of Intel’s current mainstream lineup, the HEDT segment remains popular and many consider a 5820K and X99 build a viable alternative to Skylake and Z170.

 

[lucidrenegade]

Your chart on page 1 lists the PCI-E x1 slots as PCI-E 3.0. They are actually 2.0 according to the documentation.

 

[Dan_D]

Your chart on page 1 lists the PCI-E x1 slots as PCI-E 3.0. They are actually 2.0 according to the documentation.

Error on my part. Used to dealing with Z170 boards.

 

[jaffy]

Nice review, as always. Thankfully there is no good reason to upgrade my X99-UD4 quite yet.

 

[RazorWind]

Edit: Interesting review. I just shipped the previous version (GA-X99-SLI) back to Gigabyte for RMA, and replaced it with an MSI Gaming 7, which seems to be similar in features to this one.

My experience with the regular X99-SLI was pretty bad - it mostly "worked," but would frequently refuse to resume from sleep, even at stock clock speed, and would also forget all the BIOS settings three out of four times the system was powered on.

I was sort of surprised you didn't include any other X99 setups in the benchmarks. I get that maybe the idea was to show this as a viable alternative to Skylake, but a comparison to a flagship X99 board would have been interesting to (say one of the Asus ROG ones?).

 

[Wade88]

Hello Kyle and Dan, my name is Wade and I've been reading stuff here from y'all since 2000 or 2001, I forget. Anyway, my X79 board died in March and since the warranty was nearly up I RMA'd it, put replacement board in another rig with the DDR3 and 3930k, GTX 780 and some things for backup rig, ordered the reviewed motherboard, 64GB DDR4 3,000 4 x16GB, 5930k, 980ti from upgrade in early December, and a 512GB 950 Pro ssd. I agree with the mouse issues in bios but, who uses a mouse in the bios? I just use the old style gui with keyboard only and it works just fine? I think the fancy bios gui is kind of gimmicky, and am genuinely curious as to why it's worth kind of slamming the board for it in the conclusion. In operating systems the mice (logitech ones) and keyboards (a ducky shine 4 and 5, blues) work just like they did on my Asus X79 board :-/. What kind of errors do you see with keyboard and mouse support in something besides the UEFI BIOS? After reading the review I tested the crappy old Dell keyboard that is extraordinarily dusty that my wife had from before we met, and it too worked just fine in the old style BIOS gui, the same as my mechanicals just without the clickety clack. I also have not experienced the errors that RazorWind mentioned in the post above this one. It's been running the 5930k on a EK Predator 360 at 4.5ghz since March 10th only rebooting for driver and OS updates with no surprises, it just works. Did I just get lucky or are your standards for boards colored too much by $400-500 ASUS Rampage boards with a bunch of extra crap integrated that is useless to a workstation and gaming build with a dedicated sound card like wifi and the daughter boards.

 

[FrgMstr]

I was sort of surprised you didn't include any other X99 setups in the benchmarks. I get that maybe the idea was to show this as a viable alternative to Skylake, but a comparison to a flagship X99 board would have been interesting to (say one of the Asus ROG ones?).

This is the first X99 motherboard we have reviewed since moving to Windows 10, and it greatly impacts some of the benchmarks so it is not comparable to our Win 8 benchmarks.

FWIW, we have said this for years now, motherboard benchmarks are useless for performance comparisons, but simply work well for making sure there is nothing "wrong" with the particular motherboard.

 

[FrgMstr]

What kind of errors do you see with keyboard and mouse support in something besides the UEFI BIOS?

Using mice inside of these UEFI BIOS can vary greatly from board to board. Terrible tracking and actually moving the mouse to where you want the cursor inside the BIOS is the issue.

After reading the review I tested the crappy old Dell keyboard

The UEFI BIOS issues we see have nothing to do with keyboard usage.

are your standards for boards colored too much by $400-500 ASUS Rampage boards

No. When something does not work right, it does not work right regardless of price.

I agree with the mouse issues in bios but, who uses a mouse in the bios?

Owners of the X99P-SLI do not use the mouse in the BIOS almost assuredly. If you have a newer Z170 motherboard that perfectly supports using the mouse in the BIOS, you might use the mouse in the BIOS. Quite frankly, when mouse supports works well, I tend to use it in the BIOS. YMMV.

 

[FrgMstr]

I know, and I generally agree that benchmarks aren't all that important when talking about a motherboard, but you have four or five Z170 boards shown there, it would have made sense to me to vary that somewhat. <Shrug>

We could have shown you an X99 getting scores that are the same as this one....sorry to have wasted your time, but honestly, motherboard benchmarks are a waste for comparing models inside a chipset.

That said, in this particular case, where the article talks about building an X99 setup in lieu of Skylake, I think it really does make sense to have benchmarks,

We had X99 vs Z170 benchmarks.

I know, and I generally agree that benchmarks aren't all that important when talking about a motherboard, but you have four or five Z170 boards shown there, it would have made sense to me to vary that somewhat.

Your thoughts are noted.....again.

 

[Agit66]

One thing I would like to add to this review. I have been testing with this board for about a week now, and one BIG issue that came up when testing is this:

It will ONLY support the NVMe/PCIe M.2 SSD interface. It will NOT support M.2 SATA SSD's. I spent a couple of days trying different SATA based M.2 SSD's with no luck, It took our Gigabyte tech contact 2 days to verify this. I think the worst part is that it does not specify this anywhere except their product page under the supported M.2 Support List, another thing that is semi frustrating is that they do not document which SATA ports get disabled when installing the PCIe/NVMe SSD.

 

[FrgMstr]

One thing I would like to add to this review. I have been testing with this board for about a week now, and one BIG issue that came up when testing is this:

It will ONLY support the NVMe/PCIe M.2 SSD interface. It will NOT support M.2 SATA SSD's. I spent a couple of days trying different SATA based M.2 SSD's with no luck, It took our Gigabyte tech contact 2 days to verify this. I think the worst part is that it does not specify this anywhere except their product page under the supported M.2 Support List, another thing that is semi frustrating is that they do not document which SATA ports get disabled when installing the PCIe/NVMe SSD.

Please post your emails with addresses so we can verify your FIRST POST here.

 

[GoodBoy]

Nice review. My x58 is starting to act up on me (over 7 years old omg) and I am looking at X99.. So far it was between the R5E and the msi godlike, and now this one since the review just came up. So nice timing

Not liking the high cpu% on the godlike killer nics, which I thought the whole point of the killers' was a lowered cpu utilization. Do the intel integrated nics also run off their own horsepower? Perhaps the couple % cpu utilization is coming from the disk subsystem and not the nics? Maybe we need to see a shitty nic thrown in the test results so we can really see how well they perform. Anyway this is the only downside I was really seeing to the msi godlike, and that it does have usb 3.1 but not Gen 2. And the price. Suspect they are overpaying for the killer nics. I would need some proof of definitive performance improvements to want one.

Neither the R5E or the godlike have the Gen2 usb3.1. But I have purchased a pcie card with usb 3.1 gen 2, but it would be nice if it was built in.

After seeing the latency results, I think that's enough to push the godlike out of the running for me.. I was liking its stability and the power circuitry seems well done, but no usb 3.1gen2, price is a bit out there.

So it's between the asus r5e, and this board you just reviewed. I haven't had any experience over the years with Gigabyte, and owned only ASUS for the last 3 boards. Asus has that fancy name for the Realtek audio.. any idea how that compares to an X-Fi Titanium HD? That's what I currently use, but it would be nice to get rid of the card and free up the pcie slot. Something like that would for me, help justify the asus over the gigabyte, since the price is about $200 apart.

Question about using that LatencyMon. in the graph it makes it mentions nvidia driver something, and a directX component. My question is, in using this utility, do you start it up and just let it run, or, do you start it up, then fire up a game or something, play for 10 minutes, then get out and see the results?

Thanks.

 

[Dan_D]

I was sort of surprised you didn't include any other X99 setups in the benchmarks. I get that maybe the idea was to show this as a viable alternative to Skylake, but a comparison to a flagship X99 board would have been interesting to (say one of the Asus ROG ones?).

This is our first X99 review with tests conducted using Windows 10. Our older X99 benchmarks would have been of no value. The OS, and the version of many applications have been updated since then. Going forward you can bet that we will be able to start building a larger sample set of X99 benchmarks, but for this article it remained limited to the one.

I agree with the mouse issues in bios but, who uses a mouse in the bios?

Hi Wade,

It isn't necessarily a matter of actually using the mouse with the BIOS. You obviously don't need it with this motherboard, but it's one of the features of the UEFI itself. It should work and it does work on other motherboards. When it works well, I often find myself using it from time to time. Unfortunately, mouse support and even keyboard compatibility is hit and miss with GIGABYTE motherboards. The price point doesn't have any impact on this as I've seen these problems with GIGABYTE motherboards both expensive and cheap.....er inexpensive. As for my feelings on expensive vs. inexpensive motherboards, I don't suppose you've actually read very many of our articles. If you had you would have seen the comments where we actually really liked many motherboards closer to the $200 price point and some $400-$500 motherboards that should only be used for motherboard skeet shooting.

The MSI board I mentioned in my post above works totally fine with a mouse in the BIOS. I'm not really sure how one would interact with it otherwise - it really doesn't seem like it would be keyboard friendly. I had the same problem with the previous generation Gigabyte X99-SLI that Kyle and Dan did, where the mouse tracking is VERY slow. I just dealt with it.


I know, and I generally agree that benchmarks aren't all that important when talking about a motherboard, but you have four or five Z170 boards shown there, it would have made sense to me to vary that somewhat. <Shrug> That said, in this particular case, where the article talks about building an X99 setup in lieu of Skylake, I think it really does make sense to have benchmarks, though, as the point is made that the X99 setup compares pretty favorably, despite being older, and somewhat more expensive. I recently built an X99 system, and I chose this over Skylake for two reasons:

1. I liked the idea of getting the hot-rod chipset for once. I had h-series boards previously that always got the job done, but never really did it for me on an enthusiast level, as there's not much to customize on them.
2. As you mentioned in the article, X99 gets one access to the big meaty CPUs with six or more cores. There's no replacement for more CPU cores.

Anyway, very interesting review; I agree with your conclusion, assuming that my experience with the X99-SLI was just a fluke.

We've said it a hundred times. Benchmarks comparing the same chipset based motherboards against each other is virtually pointless outside of such tests proving that a given motherboard works, or doesn't work. The performance is dictated primarily by CPU, RAM and GPU. Your motherboard has almost nothing to do with actual performance, especially in games. We could have busted out four or five X99 motherboards and updated those numbers, but ultimately it would have done little to enhance the review or add any substance to it.

You did not verify whether that was correct or not, is this correct?

No we did not. If I had an M.2 drive for testing, I'd want it to be an NVMe drive to prove that a given motherboard is booting correctly from NVMe devices. I don't think any enthusiasts will be buying SATA based M.2 drives going forward. Not given the price of the Samsung 950 Pro at any rate.

 

[Agit66]

No we did not. If I had an M.2 drive for testing, I'd want it to be an NVMe drive to prove that a given motherboard is booting correctly from NVMe devices. I don't think any enthusiasts will be buying SATA based M.2 drives going forward. Not given the price of the Samsung 950 Pro at any rate.

Sorry for any confusion Dan, that question was directed toward our Gigabyte support contact.

 

[CrazyElf]

It does look like Gigabyte's BIOS seems to lag behind what the competition is offering and the persistent USB problems are, as Kyle notes, quite severe. What's alarming is that both the Z170 and X99 Gigabyte boards that [H] has recently reviewed have all had these problems across the board. I suppose you could go the "old school" route and see if a PS/2 mouse might work better, but this should not have to happen in 2016. There's no way to sugar coat this one, Gigabyte has to do a better job on their BIOS, both in terms of UI and it seems USB compatibility.

I suppose the good news is that these matters could be addressed with a BIOS update, but it's kind of scary that this shipped out of the factory like this - X99 should be a relatively mature platform at this point and is almost 2 years old. Ultimately, it doesn't matter if the new Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt is "cool", if the USB problems persist. Dan and Kyle have a good point.

Let's wait and see what Broadwell-E has to offer. Perhaps we will see multiple refreshes across the board from other manufacturers. Perhaps they will also have Alpine Ridge - and with a more stable BIOS to boot.

 

[Dan_D]

I've had to use a PS/2 keyboard on at least one GIGABYTE motherboard recently to access the UEFI in the first place so I could configure options. It is alarming that these issues could still be problems in 2016. I don't understand why the basics are so hard for some manufacturers to get right with any real consistency.