Ouhhh Sarah Kerrigan!!! But but but wait, hold your horses, this is a Gigabyte motherboard. 😀 Legacy of the Void isn’t out yet.
OK so here it is, the beautiful board from Gigabyte, very lovely design and it’s totally strayed from the usual Gigabyte design and it’s done in a very stylish manner.
Does the board look familiar? Of course it is, remember the video I published during Computex? 😀
The GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 is lovely, the white and red colored heatsinks and I/O port covers are just awesome looking. The drawback with such a huge cover is that it restricts cable management, in fact to say “restrict” might not seem to be correct. You see, you still do get to manage the cables by having it going above the covers but this means you’ll have a very ugly cable management.
The cover and heatsinks are so huge you barely have clearance for power sockets like the CPU12V here.
Another thing I didn’t understand about Gigabyte’s design for the GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 is the placement of the Debug LED and the POWER button, of which both are at the upper corner that’s near the DIMM slots. This is not an ideal location because that’s where many components go around, typically water cooling tubes.
The GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 comes with a considerable amount of SATA ports and SATA Express ports, and I like it that they’re forward facing.
Now this is the one photo I need to highlight – check out the PCIe Metal Shielding. It’s an innovative one piece stainless steel shielding design from GIGABYTE that reinforces the PCIe connectors to provide the extra strength required to support heavy graphics cards.
The GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 comes with GIGABYTE’s exclusive AMP-UP Audio Technology, which provides the industry’s highest level of onboard audio features and technologies.
Last but not least, the I/O ports
1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse port
1 x DisplayPort
1 x HDMI port
1 x USB Type-Câ„¢ port, with USB 3.1 support
1 x USB 3.1 Type-A port (red)
5 x USB 3.0/2.0 ports
2 x RJ-45 ports
1 x optical S/PDIF Out connector
5 x audio jacks
One thing on the GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 that deserves a highlight would be the LED colors on the I/O panel and the cover on the audio system.
More details at the official product page.
User Experience
The GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 is a feature rich board and it’s a board that’s not just for gamers but for overclockers as well, of course Gigabyte does have the Overclocking series but that doesn’t mean one can’t use “Gaming” boards for overclocking.
Interestingly the UEFI design is quite different from what one can expect, for example going by the board design one might expect more white and red to be on the interface design but it isn’t.
The UEFI works fine but I do find it rather lacking, it’s pretty much like the UEFI interface on Gigabyte’s other boards, my Gigabyte Z97 Gaming 3 has a similar interface albeit of a different color.
I think the UEFI could’ve been better, for example ASUS’ ROG boards have a lovely UEFI interface that shows a whole lot of details without having one entering the hardware monitor option. The UEFI on Gigabyte’s board as such has much under-utilized space which could’ve accommodated details, like say a summary of the system’s current operating perimeter.
The Verdict
The Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 retails at RM 1039, it’s a feature rich board that makes it well worth the price for anyone that’s going for the Z170 setup.
