The Board - Layout

A "Woah" literally popped out of my mouth when I took the Gigabyte Z97X-GAMING G1 WIFI-BK out of its box. As if that isn't a mouthful, the red and black make for a striking contrast, with a hue of red that, amazingly enough, is Gigabyte's own. Just like the front, the rear of the board is covered in a matte black finish. There are quite a number of screws here to secure the board's cooling tightly. They also make it pretty easy to remove should you decide to put the board under add-on water cooling.


The red and black chunks towering over the socket leave just the right amount of clearance for most aftermarket coolers, although I can image some of the biggest solutions to cause problems. At the end of each heatsink is a G1/4 fitting receptacle, so you can easily watercool the board's power section without having to remove any heatsinks.


The Gigabyte Z97X-GAMING G1 WIFI-BK comes with three PCIe x1 slots sandwiched between a quartet of PCIe x16 slots, which is made possible by some careful engineering and a few additional chips. The four DIMM slots boast capabilities northward of 3200 MHz, which is pretty basic if you have the right set of memory to use, like I do with Avexir's 3100 MHz DIMMs I reviewed a while ago now.


The Gigabyte Z97X-GAMING G1 WIFI-BK's bottom edge holds all the usual stuff you would expect to be here, although I was surprised to see a total of four 4-pin fan headers along the bottom, two on each side. Speaking of fan headers, I found seven of those in various places, although most are in the middle or along the board's bottom edge. There are none along the top. Not having to run 12V power lines through the board to supply fans all over the place seems like a smart move, and Gigabyte's choice fan locations are such that wiring isn't really going to be an issue.


The rear I/O towers come with dual-LAN, HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI, a couple yellow USB 2.0, six blue USB 3.0, and the usual five analogue and one optical-audio ports. There is also an old legacy PS/2 connector for those who prefer such devices. The board comes with a single-port SATA Express header, two additional "regular" SATA ports up top, and six "regular" SATA 6 Gb/s ports, although four of those six depend on a Marvell controller, not the Intel Z97 PCH.