Gigabyte GA-Z97N-Gaming 5 Review

Performance Analysis

The Gigabyte GA-Z97N-Gaming 5 churned out some mightily impressive numbers at stock speed, topping the image editing graph and bettering Gigabyte's own GA-Z97X-SLI in the process. It came top in the video encoding test too, albeit only by 9 points, but an average multi-tasking test score saw it drop to third place in the overall score. Still, this is a fantastic result.

It was fairly quick in the game tests although not chart-toppingly so, but its SATA 6Gbps ports has no issues either and were just a couple of megabytes per second off the top spot. Sadly, though, there's no M.2 slot for it to have a go at bettering any of the super-fast results in the storage graph, but it also managed to post the lowest stock speed power draw results as compensation, although you'd expect it to being a mini-ITX motherboard.


Once overclocked, the overall score climbed a place to second, with only Asus' Maximus VI Impact being faster, making the GA-Z97N-Gaming 5 the fastest Z97 board we've tested at 4.8GHz. However, the biggest surprise was the on-board audio. It topped the Dynamic Range graph with a stonking result of 107.3dBA, matched by a Noise Level reading of -107dBA, although the Total Harmonic Distortion was comparatively high. Even so, these are among the best results we've seen and it's likely due to the lack of components on the PCB causing additional noise to contend with plus the beefed up audio spec.

Conclusion

With great on-board audio backed up by by Creative's SoundBlaster X-Fi MB3 Software Suite, solid benchmarks results and a reasonable price tag, the GA-Z97N-Gaming 5 is a fantastic mini-ITX motherboard. It's a shame that neither M.2 or SATA Express made it onto the PCB - this may have made many people's minds up already, but if you've already got a modern SSD then it's not a massive loss in the short term.

The EFI also isn't amazing but if you're not in there every five minutes tweaking then you'll likely have few problems and despite lowly power delivery, the GA-Z97N-Gaming 5 coped well when overclocking our Core i7-4770K, hitting a maximum stable frequency of 4.8GHz. We'll be taking a look at more mini-ITX boards over the coming weeks so if you're waiting on a review of another model, chances are we've got it covered. In the meantime we can certainly recommend the GA-Z97N-Gaming 5, with just a couple of reservations.