 On the surface this motherboard appears to suffer from a bit of an identity crisis Gigabyte couldn't figure out how to brand the thing it carries their traditional mainstream board ultra durable branding their g1 Gaming branding and like black edition in huge letters in the middle of the box. What the heck is this thing? With its factory tuning and data center DNA an Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts With its factory tuning and data center DNA an Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts All right, so apparently I wasn't tall enough during the intro and Brandon gave me another Apple box to stand on On thanks for that Brandon the answer is all of the above This is by a considerable margin gigabytes highest-end Z 97 motherboard But before we get into that let's cover the accessories shall we in the box you will find two-way three-way and four-way SLI bridges Yes, the board uses a PLX hub to give it quad crossfire and SLI support a crossfire bridge an I oh shield a wireless AC and Bluetooth combo PCIe card as well as an internal connector and antenna to go with that Six braided SATA cables half with straight and half with angled connectors and finally a three and a half inch front USB Module for your USB 3 in case your case doesn't have that all right And I guess there's also a manual stickers and a driver disc in there too on the board itself We'll kick things off with aesthetics where gigabyte has moved away From the green color scheme and guns and bullets branding elements towards a more subdued black gray and red color scheme That some will find attractive, but others myself included will find Uninspired and copycat. I mean a red and black gaming motherboard We've never seen that before but you can hardly blame them for going with what obviously works right along with the more subdued Practical looks comes a more subdued practical design You won't find any extra CPU power inputs and instead of an overbuilt 300 phase power design It's got a simple yet robust all digital eight phase CPU power design that is built for longevity rather than bling Notable inclusions are the 10k black capacitors rated at 10,000 hours at 105 degrees Celsius and the 168 hour testing procedure that each and every one of these motherboards will go through before it makes it to your hands Better QC is the kind of thing I don't mind paying more for Especially given how little there is to differentiate one motherboard from another these days The fan on the VRM heatsink from the z87 equivalent is gone replaced by beefier passive heatsinks But liquid cooling is still an option and gigabyte has actually improved the flexibility of their solution significantly by providing G1 quarter threaded holes instead of integrated barbs another thumbs up there CPU support is dictated by the LJ 1150 socket and gigabyte figures You won't have any difficulty with a last generation has well chip a has well refresh code named devil's canyon chip or even an upcoming Broadwell processor so z97 looks like a solid option for someone planning to build a system now then upgrade when Intel rolls out their new CPUs Officially we've got dual channel DDR3 RAM support up to 3200 megahertz But it should be noted that on has will CPUs maximum RAM frequency decreases as CPU frequency increases with overclocking So it's not a huge deal these days in the top right corner We'll find power reset and clear CMO switches along with a debug LED and contact points for reading onboard voltages with a multimeter Rather than relying on software the 24 pin is in its ideal location along the right hand edge of the board with front USB 3 and an auxiliary SATA connector right beneath it Make sure to plug that in if you're using more than two graphics cards on the board further down things get pretty interesting Gigabyte has added not one but two additional Marvell controllers to give this board a total of 10 SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports and They've also implemented SATA express which will consume two of the regular Intel SATA 3 ports Should you decide to use that once SSDs that support this new 10 gigabit standard become available at the bottom? We find color-coded front panel connectors and physical switches to decide which of the two BIOS chips Do you want to use as well as whether you want to use dual BIOS at all? Although I'd recommend leaving that on the PCI Express layout of this board is what I would consider ideal Not everyone likes this spacing, but here's why I like it You've got lots of space between the 16x slots here and here and you can cram four cards on the board all running In 8x mode if you really want to by having the bottom card hang down a little bit And it does this without increasing the height of the board to an XL ATX form factor Love it audio has been a big focus for gigabytes since the beginning of the G1 series and it continues to be one here They're using Nichicon audio grade capacitors a gold shielded creative sound processor and A physically separated PCB in order to improve performance and reduce interference they've also thrown in gain adjustment switches for folks with difficult to drive headphones a Swappable op amp socket if you're into that sort of thing and gold plated connectors on the back Which won't improve audio quality, but might help with longevity somewhat Now things have gone really well for the layout of this board so far But gigabyte bunged up the fan connectors a little bit in my mind Look at pretty much any modern performance case, and you'll see top mounted fans Or at least mounts for them gigabyte hasn't got any fan headers on basically the top half of the board They're here here here here here here here and here Which is perfect if your case has all of the fans in the front and the bottom a rare occurrence It's not a huge deal and fan extensions are cheap It's just something that I'd like to see improved Rear IO is a strong point for the board PS 2 is there for those random hard to diagnose issues the two USB 2.0 ports are DAC ports which supposedly provide more stable power and are good for USB sound cards Not sure why we'd need two of those especially with the excellent onboard audio But I guess it saves me the trouble of peering back there to make sure I'm using the right one if I'm using a DAC Triple displays running DVI HDMI and display port are supported off the onboard graphics And then we find six USB 3 ports two gigabit ethernet ports one Intel and one killer e2205 e2205 network chip that enables packet prioritization for your most important applications This is a layout that I really like giving me the option of Intel or the killer one and then finally Gold-plated 7.1 audio ports as well as an optical audio port for good measure speaking of good measure I hope this video gave you a pretty good measure of the awkwardly named gigabyte z97x gaming g1 Wi-Fi BK black edition Uber clock I don't know whatever anyway it includes everything but the kitchen sink hardware wise and even adds an updated easy You have UEFI BIOS mode as well as a self tuning over clocking feature within gigabytes easy to software But more importantly it adds more testing and validation so you're unlikely to end up with a lemon This is the kind of thing I really value these days, and it's great to see gigabyte raising the bar this way Thanks for watching guys as usual the link to the pricing and availability for this product is in the video description Below the like dislike and share buttons Which you should use accordingly also in the video description is a support link where you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one Give us a monthly contribution or change your Amazon bookmarks So we get an affiliate kickback whenever you buy stuff that helps us out a lot Thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe Seriously go do it. 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