Gigabyte Z97MX Gaming 5 mATX Review

Today I take a look at Gigabyte’s gaming offering for the mATX market, the Z97MZ Gaming 5. The Gaming 5 is a full featured board with a surprising amount of features in such a small package! The board comes with a LGA1150 socket, 4 DDR3 Dimms and 4 PCI-E slots.  As usual, the box is nicely designed, with the standard Gigabyte Gaming logo (that red and white eye plastered everywhere). On the back you’ll find plenty of info about the Rear I/O and feature set of the board.

As you can see above, the back of the box is rather covered with info, which I will cover in my own words later in the article!

The motherboard is very good looking overall, with a bright and glossy red chipset heatsink, bright red power phase heatsinks, and a black and grey colour scheme for the rest of the board. Even though it’s an mATX form factor, they still managed to cram a hell of a lot onto this board, with an M.2 slot below the CPU socket, PCI-E x16, x1, x8, x4 (in that order) lanes, and 4 DDR3 Dimm slots. See the gallery below for the pictures!

I really like the inclusion of an M.2 Slot on this size of board, as it’s likely to be built in a small HTPC type case and used as a compact, or even LAN gaming rig, so not having to worry about mounting a 2.5″ SSD somewhere and just having your boot drive on the board is pretty damn awesome! The board also includes a SATA express connector, which is a nice touch, but since I have almost never seen a SATA Express drive, personally that is something I am a lot less interested in. Since this is meant to be used as a mini-gaming rig, the inclusion of the full 4 DDR3 dimm slots is really important, as it means this board can support not only SLI or Crossfire, but also up to 32GB of RAM, making this an awesome content production machine too – especially something like video editing!

Please check the next few pages for more information!