If you're looking to build a full-size-tower, high-end PC based on the Intel X99 chipset and the accompanying pricey Haswell-E processors, you've clearly got some budget to work with. And if you do, the major mainboard makers have the boards to sop up plenty of it, such as the $399 Asus X99-Deluxe that we looked at last year around the time of the platform's debut. The "Deluxe" in the name sums it up well: It delivers a stunning stack of features, and pricing that fits right in with the thousands you're likely to spend on the complementary CPU and multiple graphics cards to go with it.
But if you're looking to build something a bit more modest—and more compact—within the X99 universe, you don't have nearly as many choices. In fact, if you're looking for a MicroATX X99 board, we were able to find only five available on Newegg.com at this writing in mid-June 2015. At $249, Gigabyte's GA-X99M-Gaming 5 wasn't the least expensive of those four choices, but it was only $50 more than the trailing board of the bunch, the $199.99 ASRock X99M Extreme4. And for that price, the Gigabyte board delivers a surprising amount of features given the space limitations inherent to MicroATX, and especially compared to an ATX board. You lose some PCI Express expansion slots, as you'd expect, but there's still room for a pair of dual-width graphics cards, and the board comes with both SATA Express and M.2 connectors, the latter being far more practical at the moment than the former.
In fact, Gigabyte actually managed to crowbar in a pair of M.2 slots here, with the idea that one might be used for a wireless Wi-Fi mini-card. And while a wireless card isn't included in the box, you can find various models online for $30 or less, and Gigabyte has included Wi-Fi antenna mounts on the I/O backplate of this board to facilitate the installation. It's a nice touch and obviates the need to rely on a Wi-Fi dongle or dedicate a PCI Express slot to a Wi-Fi card, and it's well in keeping with this board's compact-PC theme.
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Still, though, that compactness may make you pay in other areas. Many of the headers (USB 2.0 and 3.0 in particular) run along the bottom edge of this motherboard. If you plug an expansion card into the board's third PCI Express slot, some of those headers will hard to reach or even, potentially, interfered with. In fact, even with two dual-width graphics cards installed, it can be tough to use the USB 3.0 headers. You'll need to plan ahead in your PC build or upgrade, and get the wiring to those headers sorted out early—and expect to be in for a bit of hassle to tweak them after everything's installed in your PC's case.
X99 Chipset Features
For a detailed discussion of the Intel X99 platform's available processors, including two chips that are priced much lower than the flagship Intel Core i7-5960X's typical $1,000 tag, we urge you to take a look at the review of the high-end X99-compatible chip at the link. Here, though, before we get into the GA-X99M-Gaming 5's features and layout, we'll spend a few paragraphs discussing the X99 chipset itself, as well as outline two fairly new next-generation storage technologies we mentioned in our introduction: SATA Express and M.2, both of which are available on this motherboard.
The most noteworthy top-level change that came in with the Intel X99 chipset is the move from DDR3 to DDR4 RAM. From a practicality standpoint, this won't benefit consumers all that much in the short term. The quad-channel DDR3 memory that was used alongside previous Intel Extreme Edition chipsets like the X79 wasn't exactly being saturated or throttling performance. So DDR4 certainly isn't going to "feel" any faster in and of itself, at least until software makers find a reason and a way to take advantage of the massive bandwidth.
DDR4 does use less power (1.2 volts versus 1.5 volts with DDR3), but that's hardly a concern for most enthusiasts looking to drop in a cadre of high-priced, power-mooching parts. The biggest benefit of DDR4 in the longer term is likely going to be its higher density potential. RAM maker SK Hynix has already created DDR4 for servers that packs 128GB on a single DIMM. But don't expect to drop in 1TB of RAM, even if you could afford it. For the moment, at least, the consumer-level DDR4-compatible boards we've seen top out at support for 64GB of memory, and this Gigabyte board tops out at 32GB.
Other features of X99 bring it more into the modern age of desktop computing. At the chipset level, you get support for up to 10 SATA III ports, six USB 3.0 ports, and 40 PCI Express 3.0 lanes for use by multi-card gaming systems. Intel's more mainstream Z97 chipset, by comparison, has just 16 PCI Express lanes available by default, and that's the main reason gamers would opt for the pricey X99 platform: those extra lanes, to run multiple video cards at their full potential.
Keep in mind that, while these are the theoretical specs for the chipset (in other words, what is available to board designers), actual boards will often have more ports than are listed here, or may have less. Board makers often add extra third-party controllers to enable more ports.
Next-Gen Storage: M.2 and SATA Express Explained
In 2014, M.2 solid-state drives (SSDs) made their mainstream desktop debut alongside SATA Express in Intel's Z97 chipset. Both formats are on the cutting edge of storage, and they are capable of faster speeds than standard SATA III. The difference between the two is availability of drives. M.2 drives are readily available from drive makers such as Samsung, Crucial/Micron, Kingston, and ADATA, while consumer SATA Express drives have yet to show up on sale as of this writing in mid-2015.
The M.2 format is being groomed, for one thing, as the replacement for the tiny mSATA SSDs we've seen in plenty of ultrabooks, as well as Intel's NUC platform and other micro-PCs, such as Gigabyte's NUC-like Brix models. (Under the Z87 chipset, a few Intel-based desktop motherboards supported mSATA with dedicated slots, as well.)
Here's a look at the M.2 slots on this Gigabyte board; they are easy to miss, at right beside the red-striped heat sink with the eye logo...
M.2 drives have previously been used in Apple's late-model MacBooks and, before they withdrew from the PC market, by Sony in its VAIO Pro line. But Z97 and now X99 on the desktop look to take these drives to a wider audience of gamers and enthusiasts, who will no doubt appreciate that M.2 drives are tiny, as well as potentially much faster than standard SATA SSDs.
In a desktop-PC environment, the M.2 size benefit is of somewhat minor importance; after all, you can cram as many 2.5-inch SSDs as you can afford into most PC cases. It's the speed that matters. Some M.2 drives can outrun standard SATA drives because they borrow bandwidth from the much faster internal PCI Express lanes, which are normally used by graphics cards and other expansion cards. (At least, M.2 PCI Express drives can; confusingly, you can find both M.2 PCI Express and M.2 SATA drives, both of which can plug into M.2 slots.)
Gigabyte labels one of the M.2 slots on this board as "M.2 PCI Express x2," meaning it has access to two PCI Express lanes, and should provide up to 2GB per second of bandwidth. That's not as speedy as the M.2 x4 slot on Asus' X99-Deluxe, but it's still plenty speedy compared to the fastest SATA III drives, which top out somewhere south of 600MB per second. We've yet to see an M.2 drive that can deliver speeds much faster than 2GB per sec, anyway; they're a bit out beyond the bleeding edge at the moment, though they are coming. We wouldn't exactly call the x2 spec on this board much of a limitation at the moment.
Then there's SATA Express. We've seen quite a few Z97- and X99-chipset boards that have SATA Express connectors, so it's unsurprising that Gigabyte included the connector here as well. But while M.2 drives have become increasingly common, SATA Express is still a nascent storage interface with an unclear future. SATA Express also borrows bandwidth from the PCI Express lanes, theoretically, delivering bandwidth close to 2GB per second. But as of this writing, you can't yet buy a consumer SATA Express drive. Given the wider bandwidth of M.2, and the fact that M.2 drives are already readily available, the future of SATA Express (at least for consumer storage) seems questionable.
As for how it's implemented: The SATA Express connector is found near the SATA ports on boards that support the technology, like you can see here on our review board...
You can see the SATA Express stuff to the left of the words SATA_EXPRESS stenciled on the board. Each SATA Express drive will occupy two SATA connectors, plus the smaller power connector to the left of the two. The extra connectors are needed to provide the extra bandwidth versus standard SATA III.
Okay, enough with the theoreticals and the background. Let's get down to the nitty-gritty of this Gigabyte board.
Board Features and Layout
Designing a feature-packed MicroATX motherboard of any stripe is no easy task in general, as there's little room for the wealth of headers, slots, and sockets that serious enthusiasts demand and crave. That's made doubly difficult with Intel's X99, as the LGA2011-v3 processor socket itself is huge, and quad-channel memory means the RAM slots live on either side of the socket.
When you add the voltage-regulation modules (VRMs) and the requisite coolers, nearly half the Gigabyte GA-X99M-Gaming 5's surface area is taken up by the CPU and RAM components alone...
Even so, Gigabyte found a way to include pretty much every feature we'd expect in a fully loaded X99 motherboard, including M.2 and SATA Express connectors, a pair of USB 3.0 headers, and three PCI Express x16 slots. The third slot, however, isn't built for a graphics card, as it's too close to the slot above it. (Also, it's electrically an x8 slot, though x16 physically. More on that later.) If you're looking for a motherboard for three-way Nvidia SLI or AMD CrossFire action, you'll have to opt for a larger full-ATX board and case. There doesn't seem to be enough physical room on a MicroATX X99 board for three dual-width cards, but we certainly can't fault Gigabyte for that. That's simply a limitation of the form factor.
Walking around the board, we noted no massive pain points in terms of feature placement, although given the amount of firepower that is crammed in here, setup and installation will be tight and tedious—especially if you plan on heavily loading up the board with components.
At the very top of the board, the auxiliary power connector sits tightly surrounded by a metal cooler...
You'll want to plug in that connector early in the game if you're routing cables behind the board. In fact, you'll probably want to attach this cable before screwing down the motherboard, period. Otherwise, you'll need some very deft fingers—especially if the case you're installing this motherboard into is small.
Also on the top edge is a secondary CPU fan header, near the right corner...
The primary (white) CPU fan header lives below the CPU socket. We'd like to see these two headers closer together, but many users won't need a second CPU fan connector, unless they're installing a water-cooling apparatus with connections for both a pump and radiator fan. A pair of DIP switches here, visible above, also enables and disables Gigabyte's Dual BIOS feature and lets you switch between the two BIOS states. It's always handy to have multiple BIOSes as an option in case an update goes bad or your overclocking settings result in a boot problem.
Moving farther down the right side, the main ATX power connector sits near the center, with the SATA Express and six SATA ports...
As we mentioned earlier on, we've still yet to see a single SATA Express drive for sale, but when building an expensive system, future-looking features are appreciated. And while there are plenty of ATX motherboards with more than six ordinary SATA connectors, the six here will be plenty for most users looking to build a compact gaming rig. (You won't find too many MicroATX-only cases with more than six drive bays. That'd be like a Prius with monster-truck tires.)
Also on the right edge of this board are power, reset, and CMOS-reset buttons, which we've zoomed in a little closer to here...
The power button is backlit and big enough to see easily, but the reset and CMOS buttons are tiny (likely to save space) and easy to mistake for one another if you're jamming your finger into a cramped case. Gigabyte did make one white and one black, but if you aren't careful, it's easy to poke the wrong one—which can be a time-consuming mistake if you've customized your BIOS settings heavily.
In the lower-right corner, a two-digit debug LED is well-placed to display CPU temperature and error codes if something goes wrong in the boot process. The bottom edge of the board, meanwhile, is packed with headers.
Near the corner lives the usual cluster of color-coded front-panel connectors, followed by not one, but two USB 3.0 headers, two of the three system-fan headers (the other hides above the first PCI Express x16 slot), as well as two USB 2.0 headers...
The front-panel audio connector lives in the rear corner. This is an inconvenient place for cable routing, but a common location nonetheless, as it's directly adjacent to the audio-centric Nichicon capacitors and the AMP-UP-enabled audio circuitry (based on Realtek's ALC1150 audio chipset). The AMP-UP feature includes a persistent Gigabyte specialty, offering an upgradable OP-AMP chip, as well independent board layers to isolate the right and left audio channels. There are even DIP switches between the audio capacitors and the removable OP-AMP chip, for adjusting the gain if you're using high-impedance speakers or headphones. As for the OP-AMP business, you can buy swappable mini-chips to install here that change the general aspect of the audio. It's an interesting feature, but one only of possible interest to the very keenest audio fanatics, who we suspect, if that dedicated, would want a discrete sound card, in any case.
Like many recent-model motherboards we've reviewed and seen, this one features traces of lighting (in this case, red) running along the outer edge of the audio area on the board. Unlike most other boards, though, here you can tweak this lighting in the BIOS to glow steadily, pulse slowly on and off, and even pulse to the beat of your music. This is a feature that many will find trivial, but for those with case windows, it's an interesting and funky option, though we suspect most of the glow will be obscured by video cards and whatnot installed in the board, like on our test system...
We're glad to see Gigabyte add something different here, nonetheless. And for those who don't want their motherboard to glow, you can switch off the lighting from the BIOS.
While we're pleased to see so many headers on the bottom edge of the board (particularly the four USB headers), as we mentioned earlier on, their placement is close enough to the PCI Express slots potentially to cause problems with some setups once a PCI card is in place in that last slot. First, though, let's discuss the slots themselves.
Expansion Slots
You get three PCI Express x16 slots on the GA-X99M-Gaming 5, though only the first two are designed to be used for two cards in an Nvidia SLI or AMD CrossFire arrangement. Because of the size of the board, the third slot is too close to the slot above it to allow room for dual-slot (or possibly even bulky single-slot) coolers. Plus, all four of the onboard USB headers sit directly under the third PCI Express x16 slot.
Without some kind of right-angle adapter, it's unlikely you'll be able to plug anything but the slimmest card into this last slot while still using the headers (particularly the USB 3.0 ones, which make use of a chunky, inflexible connector). In fact, when we slid an AMD Radeon R9 290X with a stock air cooler into the second, not even bottom, PCI Express x16 slot, there was barely room to plug the standard USB 3.0 case connectors from our Cooler Master chassis into the USB 3.0 headers. We were able to plug them in, but the card's fan shroud put some sideways pressure on the connector, bending it downward, as you can see here...
That's hardly ideal, and it could possibly eventually damage the connector.
That being said, if your dual-slot cards have open-air coolers (or water-cooling!) rather than the boxy stock air coolers from both AMD and Nvidia, this may be less of an issue. And there are two USB 3.0 headers here, so if you don't need to use both you may be able to more easily access the second, rightmost header if you're using smaller or shorter graphics cards.
Still, given that you can't use the third slot for a graphics card anyway (the board only supports dual SLI or CrossFire), and it's so close to so many headers, it would have been better if Gigabyte had just nixed this slot (or made it a PCI Express x1) and allowed more room for better placement of board components. You could still use it for a slim card like a Wi-Fi card or a PCI Express board-mounted SSD, but nothing much thicker.
There's also a PCI Express x1 slot on the board, wedged between the first and second x16 slots. Downwind from it lives not one, but two, stacked M.2 slots...
One supports M.2 SSDs up to PCIe x2 speeds, as well as SATA M.2 drives. The other M.2 slot, which sits behind the first, and a bit higher up, is made for attaching a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth mini-card in the M.2 form factor. If you want wireless connectivity, you'll have to provide your own chip. But, as mentioned, Gigabyte does include antenna mounts for that purpose on the rear I/O plate, so at least the implementation will be clean.
Ports and I/O
Speaking of I/O, on the rear panel the GA-X99M-Gaming 5 sports gold-plated audio jacks and an optical audio out, for up to 7.1-channel output. And if you want to bypass the onboard internal audio with a USB DAC or speakers that have one built in, the four yellow USB 2.0 ports on the board make use of what Gigabyte calls "DAC-UP," meaning they're designed to provide noise-free power delivery to an external digital-to-analog converter. We have no way of measuring the validity of this feature, and we can't fathom why you'd need more than one DAC-friendly USB port (especially for gaming purposes). But as fans of Audioengine's A2+ speakers (and their built-in DAC), we're happy to see Gigabyte making considerations for those who prefer to use external audio components.
Also on the rear panel, as you can see above, are two standard USB 2.0 ports, along with four blue USB 3.0 ports, and two PS/2 ports for those still hanging on to an ancient input peripheral or two that they just can't quit. Our main quibble here: We'd like to see more USB 3.0 ports. You can add four more via the onboard headers, but there are no USB-port PCI-slot brackets for the rear panel included in the box, to deploy them alongside the PCI Express cards. So if you want to add more USB ports, you'll have to provide your own hardware or rely on the front-panel accommodations of your chassis. (We suspect few, if any, MicroATX chassis will provide for four front-panel USB 3.0. That's mostly a tower thing, as far as we've seen.)
The GA-X99M-Gaming 5 also includes Killer E2200 Gigabit Ethernet, designed to let you prioritize gaming traffic through your network, at your discretion, for less lag. Personally, we've never experienced a substantial benefit when using a Killer-based board over a decent Gigabit alternative from Intel or Broadcom, but the E2200 should serve gamers well, and it's a better fit for most users than a board with two Ethernet ports.
While the GA-X99M-Gaming 5 is fairly feature-packed for a compact motherboard, the selection of accessories Gigabyte chose to pack in the box with the board is somewhat sparse. Aside from the manual, a driver disc, documentation, and the requisite I/O shield, you get four Serial ATA drive cables and an SLI bridge connector.
As we mentioned earlier, we'd love to have seen a USB 3.0 PCI bracket included here, especially considering that at $250, this is far from a budget board.
A Look at the BIOS
The graphical UEFI interface included with this board is, at the very least, visually interesting, with its orange-and-black interface and a default background of lava seeping through rocks...
You can also change the background image to one of your choosing, and an HD option keeps text and visuals looking sharp, even on high-resolution displays...
It's also possible to revert the interface to a Classic mode setting, bereft of the lava and most of the frills...
In either version of the BIOS interface, there are a plethora of settings here that should keep all but the most extreme tweakers happy, and we had no major problems finding the basic features we needed for CPU and memory tweakage...
Even so, even in the graphical mode, the text-heavy interface doesn't look quite as slick as or feel quite as well-organized as the BIOS we've seen on recent Asus boards, particularly the X99-Deluxe.
Beyond the BIOS, Gigabyte also offers a small bundle of apps for controlling and overclocking the board via a mobile device, but these veer more into novelty territory than anything else.
Conclusion
Aside from issues involving using the third PCI Express x16 slot and the potential header issue if you plug in two large graphics cards, there's little to complain about with the Gigabyte GA-X99M-Gaming 5. It's an attractive board that, when combined with a Haswell Extreme Edition processor, a powerful graphics card or two, and perhaps a speedy M.2 SSD, would make for an extreme and hyper-capable gaming rig for serious multi-screen or 4K gaming.
But if you're planning on using a pair of very large graphics cards with coolers thicker than the standard dual slots, you'll have to look elsewhere, likely to a full-size ATX board. And those looking for a plethora of storage options may not be satisfied with the six SATA III connectors (and M.2) on the board. But if you need more than that, you're again better off opting for a full-size ATX board and case. You'll probably need room for all the drives, anyway.
If the above caveats aren't deal-killers for your planned config, the only real issue with the GA-X99M-Gaming 5, at least at the time of this writing in June 2015, is cost. At $249, it's certainly not overly expensive for an X99 board, considering the Asus X99-Deluxe was still selling for around $400, and a handful of kitted-out X99 boards sold for even more than that.
But if you're looking for the best value in a MicroATX X99 motherboard with a similar set of features (and even a similar color scheme), you may also want to consider the ASRock Fatal1ty X99M Killer. We haven't reviewed this board, but on paper, it looks a good match for this one. It lacks the PCI Express x1 slot and the second M.2 connector for a wireless card that Gigabyte's board has. But the Fatal1ty board has two more SATA connectors, as well as both Intel- and Killer-based Ethernet ports. And the ASRock board was selling at this writing on Newegg.com for $230, with a $40 rebate that brought it down to $189, or $60 less than Gigabyte's GA-X99M-Gaming 5.
Of course, pricing is always in flux, and the ASRock board was likely discounted at this writing to make way for a "Type-A" revision of the board that adds USB 3.1 ports. At its current pricing, while we like the design and feature set of the Gigabyte GA-X99-Gaming 5, it seems just a little pricey compared to some of the competition.
Gigabyte's Micro-ATX X99 board packs a lot of features in a small space and, with a few modest caveats, makes a good starting point for a compact, dual-card gaming system.
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