Gigabyte GA-X99-Designare EX Review

Performance Analysis

Gaming will largely depend on the titles as to how much a CPU overclock will benefit you, and while we've seen around a 10 percent boost in Ashes of the Singularity before now, Gigabyte's latest BIOS for the GA-X99-Designare EX is fairly aggressive when it comes to Turbo Mode, regularly sitting at 4GHz across a range of workloads. This means that adding another few hundred megahertz won't add a great deal in games and this is pretty much what we saw in Ashes of the Singularity, with just single frames added to the frame rates. However, put the system into a CPU-limited scenario and disable SpeedStep to get maximum performance and you can see a massive improvement in some situations such as in Unigine Valley, with the score rising from 3,783 to 6,234 just through overclocking the CPU.


Overall, the GA-X99-Designare EX was fairly potent at stock speed too in a range of benchmarks and it didn't do badly once overclocked either, despite sporting the same overclocked frequency as the other boards in the graphs. The downside to the aggressive Turbo Mode and extra paraphernalia on the PCB such as the PEX 8747 PCI-Express switch, is that power consumption was high at both stock and overclocked settings.


Storage performance was on the money with just a few megabytes a second here and there adrift of the best results although it remains to be seen if hiding the M.2 port away will mean SSDs get a little toasty - it didn't seem to impact on our results anyway. Finally, audio performance is excellent and right up there with the best we've seen from an X99 board - unless you're an audiophile and want to drop in a £150 sound card, it will likely be more than fine.

Conclusion

There's clearly a lot to consider with the Gigabyte GA-X99-Designare EX. It's loaded with features and has a ton of bandwidth for multi-GPU and PCI-Express storage configurations, but with 3-way GPU setups perhaps going the way of the dodo in the not too distant future (Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080 only officially supports 2-way SLI setups) the need for motherboards like this one is perhaps coming to an end.

They were extremely niche to start with, though, but there are plenty of other reasons to consider the GA-X99-Designare EX. It has excellent support for high-end storage, the potential of Thunderbolt 3, Intel-powered USB 3.1 and LAN ports, RGB lighting and onboard Wi-Fi. It might not be as attractive to more mainstream users in need of an X99 system as Asus's X99-A II or Deluxe II (even the latter, which sports a few more useful features is cheaper), but if you need to use three high-end GPUs and require full x16 speed for those three slots, then it just about has you covered. It's a shame many useful features such as overclocking and testing tools were omitted and Gigabyte still lags behind when it comes to its EFIs, but the GA-X99-Designare EX just about scrapes through with our Extreme Award.