Unboxing and packaging
The box looks neat with a GIGABYTE Gaming series logo and the Intel® logos of the chipset and CPU support and has a good aesthetic appeal.
The back side has some special features explained and a brief spec of the board.
An ESD bag protects the board from static electricity.
Packaging was good. The accessories were well packed inside the box below the motherboard.
In box accessories:
Accessories were common and includes:
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User manual and Installation guide booklets
Driver disc(not shown in picture)
Two stickers: Ultra Durable and G1 Gaming
Total 4 SATA 6 Gb/s cables
Back panel I/O shield
NVIDIA SLI™ bridge
Layout
The board:
The motherboard is based on the black and red theme as seen in GIGABYTE Gaming series motherboards.
The board was cleaned adequately. There was minimal solder residue(flux).
Back I/O ports:
The back panel features:
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Two PS/2 ports supporting a keyboard and mouse
Four USB 2.0 ports
Four USB 3.0 ports
VGA, DVI and HDMI ports for video output
RJ-45 ethernet port
Six audio jacks for 8 channel audio support with support for optical S/PDIF output.
There are two plastic caps for protecting the onboard DVI and HDMI ports from dust and moisture. This is a good approach by GIGABYTE as I have often seen that leaving them unused causes corrosion in the ports.
Power connectors:
The board is powered using the standard 24 pin EATX and 8 pin EPS plugs.
Expansion capabilities
SATA ports:
The motherboard has a total of 8 SATA ports all at SATA 6 Gbps. 6 of them are from the Intel Z97 chipset. The remaining 2 is handled by a Marvell 88SE9172 chip which I will include in the technical section. One SATA Express port is included.
The board also has support for the latest M.2 slot having bandwidth of 10 Gbps. Please note that M.2 was formerly known as Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF).
PCI-E slots:
Top to bottom: PCIe 2.0 x1 slot 1, PCIe 2.0/3.0 x16 slot @x16, PCIe 2.0 x1 slot 2, PCIe 2.0 x1 slot 3, PCIe 2.0/3.0 x16 slot 2 @x8, PCI slot 1, PCIe 2.0/3.0 x16 slot 3 @x4.
The motherboard supports NVIDIA® SLI™ Technology and AMD CrossFireX™ Technology. Maximum dual GPU bandwidth is x8 + x8 mode. The bandwidth of PCIE slots are shared.
When the second PCIE x16 slot is populated, the first slot will operate at x8 mode.
When the last PCIE x16 slot is populated, the first slot will operate at x8 mode and the second at x4 mode.
RAM slots:
4 DIMM slots are provided supporting up to 32 GB of memory each memory module being 8 GB in size. The board supports memory overclocking up to 3200 MHz. Please note that this much overclock depends primarily on the capability of the CPU since the memory controller is integrated within the CPU. Additional cooling might be required.
Layout is very good. Every slot is placed as they should be and should not cause any issues.
