Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in

Z97X-Gaming 5 Firmware

Intel Z97 Express: Five Enthusiast Motherboards, £115 to £130
By

This is just my opinion, but Gigabyte’s new firmware GUI has become nearly useless to enthusiasts. Fortunately, a click of the keyboard’s F2 key brings up all the familiar settings of “Classic Mode”.

Switching from our locked Core i7-4790 to an unlocked Core i7-4770K gives us all the options we need to reach 4.5 GHz at 1.25 V core. There are, of course, several menus to jump through.

The board also supports our DDR3-2800 samples, even at 4 x 8 GB. Primary, secondary, and tertiary timings are adjustable in dual-channel (manual mode) or per-channel (advanced manual mode) arrangements.

If you’re like us, you might be tired of jumping through submenus only to find that the Advanced Voltage Settings menu is nothing more than a list of submenus. But we’re almost through!

Leaving other settings at motherboard defaults, we found our 1.25 V CPU core and 1.65 V DRAM core voltage targets approximated at 1.22 and 1.62 volts, respectively. The actual DRAM voltage was measured at 1.644 V, but the Z97X-Gaming 5 only supports increasing that setting in 20mV increments. The 1.64 V setting pushed our RAM to nearly 1.67 volts!

Ask a Category Expert

Create a new thread in the UK Article comments forum about this subject

Example: Notebook, Android, SSD hard drive

Display 1 comment.
This thread is closed for comments
  • 0 Hide
    Putolev , 14 May 2014 09:28
    Sorry to say but this "review" didn't bring anything worthwile to me at all. If you take a certain price range and compare the products found there, they ought to be quite similar, right? Well then there's no surprise if no great differences are to be found. Like the reviewer stated, the features make the difference between like the great deal with Gamecaster (which has no value to me at all).
    What I found lacking is the reviewing of those features like software (audio, fan control etc.), VRM quality, "other stuff".
    Now what is this "other stuff" really? Which motherboard has the best "other stuff"? I didn't get it from the review.
    Apart from the very simple introduction to the software and hardware, I can't really make what's better between Gigabyte and MSI, the one's I'm interested in. MSI has better UEFI, I understood but how is the software? How many VRM phases and their quality? Is MSI's audio suite better than GB's?
    These are what make the products apart in the same price range but finding the value leader with good explanations for why was not possible from this article despite it's title.