Test System

Initial Setup

Installing all of my gear was actually pretty easy, even with the board's additional slots and ports. My large CoolerMaster TPC812 tower cooler fit perfectly, with plenty of clearance around the cooler's heatpipes.


I did manage to get some testing of the SATA Express port in and noted that Gigabyte's port layout should lend itself well to case management, with the ports likely to be used at the bottom rather than the top, which would place wiring closer towards the middle of the board. The USB 3.0 and DIMM slots are also pretty far away from the uppermost PCIE slot I installed my MSI GAMING GTX780 into.


On the other side of my MSI card sat the cooler, its eye looking madly at the crazy betrayal it felt as it saw MSI's VGA there, but it's the card I got, so it's what you see here. With just a single card installed, all the hardware-based features were easily accessible, but I can image that four installed cards might make things a bit difficult when it comes time to play with the audio features and such. However, every button and each measurement point was readily accessible because Gigabyte placed them properly.


Once I booted the system up, I took the usual CPU-Z screenshot before running the benchmarks you will find below. I also managed to get my reference 4.6 GHZ overclock with relative ease, a screenshot of which is above. My obligatory SuperPI 32m and wPrime results have been included in that screenshot, too, for those interested in investigating the clock efficiency of the board's automatically applied settings.

Power Consumption

We measure CPU power consumption since one of our first tasks is to truly verify system stability. I isolate the power coming through the 8-pin ATX connector using an in-line meter that provides voltage and current readings, and total wattage passed through. While this may not prove to isolate the CPU power draw in all instances, it does serve as a good indicator of board efficiency and effective VRM design. Total system power consumption is no longer reported as this figure can change depending on what VGA is installed. The sole board-only power measurements possible without physically modifying a motherboard are those taken via the 8-pin CPU connector, making it the only figure of value worth reporting. I use wPrime with eight threads selected in the options since it provides a consistently high workload throughout the full length of the test and runs long enough for the VRM and CPU to produce a fair bit of heat. Most average workloads will draw far less than that, although distributed computing applications are quite similar. This is not supposed to test stability since I use several other applications to do so, but merely to provide repeatable power draw numbers anyone can replicate. The meter used is an off-the-shelf Zalman unit that has been on the market for some time. It provides similar results in my test environment when compared with a FLUKE 337 clamp meter.


The Gigabyte Z97X-GAMING G1 WIFI-BK consumed a fair bit more power than I expected, although I suppose that PLX bridge plays its role. Yet, looking at the voltages the board used, I do have to place some of the blame on its BIOS settings rather than the PLX chip. However, we are not talking about much as figures were only five to eight watts above what I expected.