A Motherboard Tested
Gigabyte Z270X GAMING 5 Review
Better price and just as good as the Gaming 7 ?
So you have just read our Gaming 7 series review, right? Well, there's a Gigabyte GA-Z270X Gaming 5 model as well, and quite honestly this one makes a lot more sense value for money wise. The gaming 5 models is 98% the same as the Gaming 7, however is cheaper as Gigabyte dropped the ThunderBolt chip and lowered the audio solution, to a still great Realtek ALC 1220 CODEC driver by Sound Blaster X-Fi MB5 software suite. So with the 7000 series processor (Kaby Lake) released, it's time for a peek at the motherboards based on Z270. In this review we'll discuss the Gigabyte GA-Z270X Gaming 5 model (not 7), in a wide variety of benchmarks and situations. We review the Gigabyte Z270X GAMING 5 with an Core i5 7600K processor. That puppy is developed on the 14nm node the Core i5 series processors are intended to be the more budget friendly offering from Intel, for a more mainstream consumer. For this review we look at the performance of this processor and motherboard in a wide variety of benchmarks and situations.
Kaby Lake processors for the desktop platform have been released. Though you'd think it is an all new chip, however it is merely a respin seen from Skylake, meaning both series processors are Socket 1151. This also means that IF you are in the market for a new series 7000 processor, your H170 or Z170 motherboard can be compatible with Kaby Lake after a motherboard BIOS upgrade. The new series Kaby Lake processors are fairly energy efficient, still as powerful as they have been for years. If you are interested in new technologies like Intel Optane, you will however need to upgrade to a Z270 and H270 range motherboard. This new Z270 platform offers supports for Optane SSDs and offers supports for slightly faster DDR4 memory.
Much like the Gigabyte Z270X GAMING 7 motherboard, the GAMING 5 model is an aesthetically pleasing platform fitted with the latest that technology can house like up-to 4000+ MHz XMP DDR4 memory, the fastest NVMe PCIe and M.2. storage unit support, lacking is an expensive 40 gb/s Thunderbolt chip and for this model the audio solution was dropped to ALC 1220, which is still a pretty awesome one to be honest. The Z270X GAMING 5 also comes with two physical M.2. slot, and combined with an PCIe M2 storage unit you could even set these up in RAID0 (albeit RAID is a bit of a thing of the past for consumers ever since SSDs emerged.
The GAMING 5 model also comes with RGB FUSION, the video below demonstrated the GAMING 7, but the RGB FUSION implementation is 100% similar to that on the Gaming 5.
Obviously there is a lot more going on, what we like for example os that this motherboard offers both a Killer E2500 and Intel Gigabit LAN connector, so you can choose whichever one you prefer. Lacking however is WIFI, which we feel is a bit of a miss. Armed with that Z270 chipset this motherboard offers three x16 slots: 1x PCIe 3.0 x16, 1x 3.0 x8 and one 3.0 x4. But yeah. Let's get started with the actual review shall we?
