Test – Gigabyte X99 Gaming G1 Wifi: Specs | Price | CPU | Profitability | Hashrate | best Coins | Config | Advantage (Pros) and Disadvantages (Cons) and other important features that will help you make better decision.
With the arrival of the new Skylake processors on socket Z170 there are only these for these motherboards, like the monstrous Z170X Gaming G1 that I tested here, but we must not forget the high end from Intel always represented by processors on socket 2011-3! Today I am going to present you the best of the best from Gigabyte designed for high-end processors from Intel, I named the X99 Gaming G1 Wifi, as its name suggests, we are dealing with a motherboard equipped with an X99 chipset, designed for “gaming” and equipped with a WiFi card and a high-end audio part.
Offered at a price of around 360 € it is located in the middle of the pack of X99 motherboards, let’s see what the beast has in the belly!
| Gigabyte X99 Gaming G1 Wifi | |
|---|---|
| Format | E-ATX (30.5cm x 25.9cm) |
| Socket | Intel LGA 2011-3 |
| CPU | Intel Core i7 |
| Chipset | Intel X99 Express |
| Memory | 8 x DDR4 2133 Mhz “Quad Channel” Support XMP Maximum of 64GB Up to 2800 MHz (OC) |
| Expansion slots | 2 x PCIe 3.0 16X (working in 16X) 2 x PCIe 3.0 16X (working in 8X) 3 x PCIe 2.0 1X (working in 1X) 1 x M.2 socket 1 (WiFi card) 1 x M.2 socket 3 |
| Multi-GPU | AMD CrossFire 4-Way nVidia SLI 4-Way |
| Audio Chipset | Creative® Sound Core 3D Support Sound Blaster Recon3Di TI Burr Brown® OPA2134 operational amplifier |
| Wired Network | 1 x Qualcomm® Atheros Killer E2201 (10/100/1000 Mbit) 1 x Intel GbE (10/100/1000 Mbit) |
| Wireless network | 1 x Intel Wireless AC 7260 (802.11 a / b / g / n / ac) Bluetooth 4.0 |
| Number of connectors for fans | 5 x 4-pin PWM |
| Storage | Intel X99: 1 x M.2 Socket 3 1 x Sata Express 10 x SATA 6Gb / s Support RAID 0/1/5/10 |
| Usb | Back panel: 8 x USB 3.0 / 2.0 2 x USB 2.0 / 1.1 Internal connectors: 2 x USB 3.0 connectors 2 x USB 2.0 connectors |
| Video outputs | No |
| Price | ~ 360 € |
As we can see we are dealing with a good big motherboard well filled, socket 2011-3 hosting the latest Intel Core i7 Haswell-E or EP (5820K, 5930k, 5960x and Xeons) in E-ATX format, therefore larger than a standard motherboard. On the other hand, the card only accepts DDR4, 8 slots are available for a total of maximum 64 GB of RAM operating natively at 2133 MHz but overclockable up to 2800 MHz, of course XMP profiles can be used.
In terms of PCIe ports Gigabyte sees things in a big way with 4 16x ports (2 wired in 16X and 2 in 8X) which will allow SLI / Crossfire up to 4 cards except for the small Core i7 5820K which will not support the SLI only on 3 cards maximum (because it has “only” 28 PCIe lanes instead of 40 for the i7 5903K and 5960X).
The X99 Gaming G1 Wifi is not left out in terms of integrated components with a sound part isolated from the rest of the motherboard driven by a high-end Creative Sound Core 3D chipset, high-end dedicated capacitors and an amplifier Texas Instrument Burr Brown® OPA2134 which should eliminate the need for a high end third party sound card.
Regarding the network Gigabyte gives us 1 x Atheros Killer E2201 chipset (supposed to “improve” the ping in game among other things, but which is in fact only a software overlay for prioritization of the applications) and 1 x Intel GbE chipset , both are of course capable of delivering a bandwidth of 1Gb. In addition to wired connections, an Intel Wireless AC 7260 WiFi card is available and compatible with 802.11 a / b / g / n / ac standards, therefore a maximum speed of 867 Mb.
Regarding storage there again there is what is needed, 10 Sata 6Gb / s ports managed by the X99 chipset (with Sata Express compatibility) and 1 M.2 PCIe port which will be perfect for stalling a small family SSD.
Offered at a price of around 360 € it has a lot of assets and features, let’s see what it has in its belly!
The box is not in the lace, a shiny black grainy coating is present which gives an impression of high-end, we find the logo of the brand, the model of the motherboard as well as the eternal Intel logos and the mention “Ultra Durable ”which shows that the card is equipped with high-end capacitors.
At the rear there is a view of the motherboard with the main strengths as well as the specifications and a photo of the rear connectors.
In the box there is an individual cardboard protecting the motherboard, under a transparent plastic mold in order to see the beast even before having your hands on it!
As we can see Gigabyte does not skimp on accessories, especially when it comes to multi-GPU bridges which cover all possible configurations, the bright I / O panel will make connecting peripherals to the back less frustrating than blindness and braided Sata cables are really nice little things. On the other hand, a curiosity comes to slip in all this, the adapter 3 x 8-pin CPU (female) -> 1 x 8-Pin CPU (male), but) what can it be used well? After careful consideration, I would say that it is used to strengthen the power supply to the CPU in case we have a power supply equipped with several of these connectors, given that the Core i7 on socket 2011-3 can be abysmal in terms of consumption. there may be an interest.
Voici la bête! Le moins que l’on puisse dire est que tout ceci est bien chargé! L’ajout des quelques centimètres par rapport à une carte au format ATX est clairement le bienvenu ici. Le look est bien entendu typé « gaming », noir et rouge qui représentent le « standard » actuel pour tous les produits fais pour les joueurs, et on ne veut pas savoir pourquoi, on y trouve 4 radiateurs reliés entre eux par des caloducs afin d’aider à la dissipation.
La qualité de fabrication générale est excellente, la carte est solide, lourde et respire la qualité, elle est clairement faite pour durer. Voyons voir tout cela de plus près.
A l’arrière on retrouve toujours un PCB noir mat qui respire la qualité, tous les radiateurs sont fixés à l’aide de vis comme toutes les cartes mères haut de gamme afin d’assurer une plus grande durée de vie.
Un total de 5 connecteurs pour ventilateur 4-pin sont présents, éparpillés sur la carte mère. Dommage de ne pas avoir de connecteur près de la connectique arrière qui accueille le ventilateur du boitier.
Une attention particulière a été portée à la partie son de la Gigabyte X99 Gaming G1 Wifi, en effet on à le droit à une partie dédiée isolée du reste de la carte, un chipset Creative Sound Core 3D, des condensateurs haute qualité ainsi qu’un amplificateur Texas Instrument, autant dire que le son sera vraiment excellent pour du son intégré. L’interrupteur (à gauche des condensateurs verts) permeet d’augmenter l’amplification des sorties micro/casque de 2.5X (d’origine) à 6X pour les casques qui ont une impédance élevée (comme le Sennheiser G4me Zero testé ici).
The card is equipped with 4 PCIe 16x ports, 2 of them are cabled in 16x (in blue) and will also work all 2 in 16x during a crossfire or an SLI, the others are cables in 8x (in red) . Naturally, to have the best results when using more than one graphics card it will be preferable to install the cards in the blue ports, even if the difference in performance between 16x and 8x will be undetectable.
High-end motherboard requires Gigabyte to equip its card with buttons for powering on, restarting, resetting the BIOS as well as a rather unusual button, in fact the DTB (or Direct To BIOS) button will allow access in the BIOS without having to press any keys on the keyboard during startup, we will get directly into it. In addition to this there are points of tension for those who would like to check.
One M.2 Socket 1 port is occupied by the integrated Intel WiFi card, the other is an M.2 Socket 3 which is capable of delivering a maximum bandwidth of 10 Gb / s, for a good small SSD for example.
No need to draw you a picture here, a good big package of Sata connectors, including one Sata Express compatible, all controlled by the Intel X99 chipset, so no questions to ask.
The radiators are of a very sufficient size to be able to calm the heat of the various components which are likely to heat up well, such as VRMs for example.
At the back we have the right to (from left to right):
We can say that the number of USB ports is really high on the Gigabyte X99 Gaming G1 Wifi, not having video outputs helps a lot! In addition to the connectors for the WiFi antenna, there are even buttons allowing easy overclocking and a reset of the BIOS.
On the left we find information about the processor such as its voltages, temperatures and fan speed as well as memory information. On the right, system information, voltages, processor temperature as well as the speed of the various fans connected.
In the Frequency part it is possible to modify the frequency of the GPU integrated into the processor as well as the processor ratio and activate the XMP profile of the memory. In Advanced Core Parameters free access is left to the user to modify the ratio of each Turbo mode, deactivate / activate cores, modify the consumption limitation etc.
The Memory part as you can imagine is dedicated to the memory, activation of XMP, modification of the manual frequency, the voltages etc .. and this on each of the 4 different pairs of memories.
In Voltage we find all the modifiable voltages, and there is what it takes to have fun, CPU voltage, chipset and memory. There is definitely something for the more adventurous to do.
The Miscellaneous section offers some general settings but above all ventilation control. For each fan it will be possible to define ventilation profiles, normal, silent or even manual according to your needs or desires.
In Home it is possible to manage profiles, the bios options can therefore be saved as you wish on each of the profiles.
Save & Exit comme son nome l’indique est l’endroit où l’on sauvegarde et redémarre le PC, charge et sauvegarde les profiles, mais également Flash le Bios grâce à l’utilitaire Q-Flash. Dans préférence il sera possible de régler certains paramètres de l’interface du bios, la résolution, le type d’affichage, rechercher une option, régler la vitesse de la souris (qui est très basse par défaut)..
Au final le bios de la Gigabyte X99 Gaming G1 Wifi est très complet et comblera une large majorité des utilisateurs, il y a vraiment tout ce qu’il faut. Les férus d’overclocking extrêmes trouveront beaucoup de réglages, surtout au niveau des tensions pour bien paramétrer tout cela.
Gigabyte offers us a motherboard with a fairly large panel of software available, without these being essential they can be useful if you want to overclock / adjust your fans / update your bios via Windows. I will take a quick tour of the different software available:
EasyTune
By launching EasyTune it is possible to overclock your processor with a single click, by choosing one of the available presets:
As the name of the software suggests, it’s easy! With one click you can overclock your processor, very good for beginners, but be careful to control the temperatures once the settings have been applied because the software tends to be very large on the voltages applied.
The other 3 tabs are there for finer settings, voltages, memory and more! You have to know what you are doing if you start to touch this, use it at your own risk!
System Information Viewer
The System Information tab, as its name suggests, presents information about your processor, memory and motherboard.
More interesting, the Smart Fan Auto tab makes the configuration of the fans changeable in 1 click with 4 predefined settings (Performance, Fulls Speed, Quiet, Normal).
This is certainly the most interesting part for any silent pc fan, it will allow you to configure the speed of your fans as you see fit in relation to the temperature of the processor (unfortunately only this temperature). The ventilation curve can be changed and you can make your PC as quiet as possible, or as efficient as possible, according to your desires!
It will also be possible to set alerts according to different settings, for example if the processor exceeds a certain temperature, if a fan goes too low or even a drop in voltage etc.
@Bios
Gigabyte provides a small utility that allows you to update the motherboard Bios, either via a file already downloaded, directly on Gigabyte’s servers or to save your Bios in a file.
Ambient LED
For those who do not like LEDs or who would like to customize all this a bit Gigabyte also provides a small module allowing to turn on / off the lights of the rear panel of the motherboard but also that of the audio part.
The Gigabyte X99 Gaming G1 Wifi has been tested with the configuration below:
In order to have results covering a wide range of applications, I chose the following benchmarks:
The motherboard will be opposed to the Gigabyte X99 Gaming 5 previously tested here.
Cinebench is particularly fond of multicore, the result is therefore necessarily high (578 for a Core i5 4670K for example), the 2 motherboards logically reach an almost identical score with 1048 for the X99 Gaming G1 Wifi and 1045 for the X99 Gaming 5.
Hanbrake is also a good little software to use all the cores of its processor, the 5820K installed on the Gaming G1 does the work of encoding the file in 77 seconds against 78 seconds for the Gaming 5, for comparison a Core i5 4670K does it in 106 seconds.
SuperPI 32M on the other hand uses a single core, the 5830K takes 8 minutes and 56 seconds on the Gaming G1 against 8 minutes and 58 seconds on the Gaming 5, the Core i5 4670K is on the other hand faster here with 8 minutes and 20 seconds, but this result is quite normal because the latter has a higher “boost” frequency on 1 core than the 5820K.
The results between the 2 cards are identical here, with a score of 63457 for the CPU for the Gaming G1 and 63378 for the Gaming 5, the memory bandwidth is also identical with 43146 MB / s for reading and 40 120 MB / s for writing. for the G1 against 43333 MB / s and 40003 MB / s for the Gaming 5. Aida64 shows big differences with solutions like the Core i5 4670K which makes “only” 36620 on the benchmark processor, 24045 MB / s for reading and 25030 MB / s write, the 6 cores as well as the DDR4 “Quad Channel” memory help greatly 😉
Logically the results in the games are strictly identical, no change is to be noted between the 2 motherboards!
Intel controllers having been very efficient for quite some time now there is no difference in performance between the 2 motherboards, hard drives and SSDs will behave the same with top notch performance.
In terms of ethernet speeds, the results are excellent with the Qualcomm Killer chipset as with the Intel chipset, with 975Mb / s in upload and 980Mb / s in download, nothing to say the ethernet network part of the X99 Gaming G1 is efficient. Note that the ping which was supposed to be improved with this chipset and as I had already seen on other motherboards equipped with the Killer 2201, the results were logically identical, an integrated chipset cannot modify the ping unless to be downloading and that the network driver supports the prioritization of the packets.
The Gigabyte X99 Gaming G1 Wifi card has been tested in real conditions, and not glued to a high-end router specially purchased for the occasion, in fact in 99% of cases the PC is connected to the box so this will be the same for this test! The connection is made to a SFR NB6 box (optical fiber with a speed of 1Gb / 200Mb) and through a wall.
The result is really very satisfactory for a Wifi connection with a speed of up to 61.2 Mb / s in download and 64.1 Mb / s in upload, which means that those of you connected to ADSL2 + will not see the difference. at the level of your speeds compared to a wired network but on the other hand as usual the optical fiber will be restricted by the Wifi, which is quite logical!
Overclocking was very simple with the Gigabyte X99 Gaming G1, we push the Vcore a little to 1.30V, we put the multiplier coefficient to 45 and we get a Core i7 5820K which runs at 4.5GHz (+ 36%)! Beyond the stability problems appeared and the temperatures soared so I preferred to stop there, which is already not bad. Let’s see the gains that can be expected from such a rise in power.
As we can see all the benchmarks are delighted with this increase in frequency, especially multicore applications such as Handbrake and Cinebench, it is clear that the encoding or the calculation software will be in heaven. In games, on the other hand, the gain is marginal, constrained by the graphics card, but this is also the case on a “simple” Core i5.
In the end, the X99 Gaming G1 Wifi behaved very well and managed to contain the ardor of a Core i7 5820K overclocked to 4.5GHz (this will depend on the quality of the processor of course) while remaining stable.
Here we are at the end of this test, what about the Gigabyte X99 Gaming G1 Wifi?
Gigabyte offers here a motherboard oriented “gaming” which offers everything that players will need, a high-end audio part that will do without a third-party sound card, the management of multi GPU up to 4 graphics cards (that either AMD or nVidia), 2 network chipsets (including the famous “Killer 2201” which is only more purely marketing), a high-performance wifi card that also eliminates the need for a third-party card, etc.
The performance is excellent, even if it does not really exceed its little sister the X99 Gaming 5 (tested here), it offers advanced settings for overclocking and is able to withstand the ardor of large Core i7 processors, no worries about it. Instability was only observed in my testing, either with the processor at original or overclocked frequencies.
Offered at a price of around 360 € it is however not made for all budgets, if you are looking for a high-end motherboard at a low price compared to the competition then the X99 Gaming G1 will be an excellent choice for those who want a motherboard that does the job very well then other less expensive models are available 🙂
Advantages
A big thank you to Wilfrid from Gigabyte who allowed me to do this test.
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