Gigabyte X99-Gaming 5P Review

Overclocking

Our Core i7-5960X hasn't proven to be the world's best overclocker, but anything over 4.3GHz is usually an indication of some promise if you're looking to ramp up those clock speeds.

The X99-Gaming 5P happily hit 4.3GHz with our usual 1.3V and the CPU sat in the low eighties under load too, so we headed back to the EFI to boost the clock speed. We raised the baseclock 1MHz to give a frequency of just under 4.4GHz and proceeded to run all but one of our benchmarks without a hitch - even Prime95 was stable for a good 15 minutes.

However, Terragen 3 stubbornly refused to complete its torturous 4 minute-long rendering benchmark without the PC falling over, so sadly, despite ramping up half a dozen voltages and boosting the vcore up to 1.35V, we still couldn't make it stick so opted for our original 4.3GHz.

This is still right on the limit of what you'd want for an every day overclock on this CPU anyway, unless you get a much more potent sample than us.

EFI

The EFI looks identical to Gigabyte's other X99 boards we've reviewed and provides a fairly easy layout to tune and overclock your system. As we've said in the past, it's not quite on par with MSI's and Asus's efforts, which are meore appealing and clearer, while Asus's EFIs in particular come with additional features too.

That said, if you'll be applying your overclock then probably not hitting the EFI again more than once or twice a year, the X99-Gaming 5P won't pose any issues here, while die-hard overclockers will likely want to opt for a different motherboard for other reasons anyway.






Head over the page to see the Performance Analysis, Conclusion and Scores.