GIGABYTE Z97X Gaming 7 LGA 1150 Motherboard Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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GIGABYTE Z97X Gaming 7 LGA 1150 Motherboard Review - GIGABYTE's Z97X Gaming 7 promises solid overclocking and performance. The feature list for the Z97X Gaming 7 is long and includes gamer focused features like a dedicated audio amplifier, Sound Blaster X-Fi MB3 support and more. We've had mixed results with the GIGABYTE lately, so the real question is; does it work?
 
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I own this board for my second computer, i5 haswell does 4.7 , vietnam chip , H110

Got the i5 haswell , and gigabyte g7 at micro center 2 months ago for 299.99 combo deal after the rebate.



I only have one SSD to boot OS and it will boot in 5 sec. I think the onboard sound is really nice, also the LED lights on the mobo are pretty cool.

I think silver rating is a fair assessment since my primary board is a Asus maximus VII i7 at 4.8 with the kraken x67 and the quality of asus is alot nicer.
 
I'm surprised to see a PS/2 Keyboard and mouse port...pleasantly surprised. I wish more boards had them both. I can work around it but sometimes I like to use my old MX1000 and a PS/2 keyboard.
 
Just bought this last week with an I7-4970k for my son to replace an I7-920. Seems to be very good so far.
 
Great review!

I have a small correction to a sentence near the end of the conclusion section.

"SSD drives likely find themselves in the boat."

What boat is that? I bet it's the same boat.

I would also say "will likely find themselves" or "would likely find themselves".
 
I grabbed the uATX version and a 4690K and have been quite happy with it. The visual aesthetics of the bios are beyond tacky, but hey, it works!
 
I bought one at the Richardson MicroCenter in a bundle with an i5 4670K July 4th of last year to upgrade an aging/dying AMD system and it has been rock solid every since I bought it. Still need to upgrade the Video Card (yeah, I won the HD 6870 at the second [H]ard|OCP GamExpreience event years ago and just haven't gotten round to upgrading my video card yet). It is getting very long in the tooth. Plan on upgrading that this summer.

And Kyle, next time you see Monte, tell him Bill from the SGL said hello.
 
hmmm..... that onboard audio which I glad I saw.... was about to buy the msi krait for 109 with 10 dollar rebate, which is very good I thought, but saw these boards with this good onboard audio. what other boards are comparable to it?

also I knew at one time I thought there was a small kickback to hardocp if you used their link. Looking at newegg and amazon. its going to be mobo, proc, ram and harddrive. not much but if I can contribute even a dollar...

so far im thinking newegg because they have the intel i5 4690k for 225 bucks, gigabyte gaming 5 for 129.99 and mushkin 16gb ridgeline cas 9 for 104. then wd green 2tb harddrive till I can get more money in like 6 months for a 256gb or so ssd with windows 10.
 
hmmm..... that onboard audio which I glad I saw.... was about to buy the msi krait for 109 with 10 dollar rebate, which is very good I thought, but saw these boards with this good onboard audio. what other boards are comparable to it?

I'm not sure which other boards are comparable, but I will say that for onboard audio, it does sound very good. I haven't yet started swapping in op amps yet, but plan to experiment a little since I have TONs of nice audio op amps laying around. The OPA2604 might be nice to try, as well as maybe some of the ADI ones.

I'd still use an outboard interface for doing anything professional, but for gaming I'm fairly impressed.
 
I have this boards little brother, the GA Z97Z-SLI. I use to like Gigabyte Boards as a very stable easy to use and rock stable buy. But O man does the uefi suck!
 
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