Gigabyte X99-SLI Motherboard Review – Welcoming & Budget Friendly!

Today we will have a look at the Gigabyte X99-SLI motherboard and its features, as well as putting it through some benchmarks to see how the board performs. At first glance we were expecting this board to perform nicely on air and water, which as you will see for a budget board it performs quite well even overclocked. Gigabyte is well known for its fleets of motherboards in all series to meet the needs of the end users, from your average home user, gamer, overclocker and extreme overclocker. The Gigabyte X99-SLI caters for your average user and gamer, while overclocking rather well for those who want the bit of extra performance.

The Gigabyte X99-SLI comes from the Ultra Durable (UD) line of motherboards and offers great value for your money even at the low end of the UD line which still has top notch build quality and reliability. Now let’s get into the review and see what the Gigabyte X99-SLI has to offer and how the motherboard performs.

UNBOXING AND FIRST LOOK

At first look at the packaging, it is rather small compared to high-end boards. In fact it is the same size of motherboards at this level. As you can see the packaging has all the major details and is rather nice looking which makes for a nice touch.

The packaging is made from cardboard with a nice shine to it which suggests that there is some form of coating over the packaging which is to be expected. Simple yet effective packaging is one area in which Gigabyte has cut costs while keeping Gigabytes high standard of build quality on the motherboard.

When we opened the packaging there is a simple, but effective tray that contains the motherboard wrapped in the usual anti-static bag. This tray separates the board from the accessories, where you will find the included accessories; the motherboard’s I/O shield, manuals, and driver CD. We were disappointed that Gigabyte only included two SATA cables which both are 90 degree. The accessories also include a SLI as well as a crossfire bridge.

SPECIFICATIONS AND PRICING

The Gigabyte X99-SLI comes in around the $250 mark on Amazon ($179 if you are subscribed to Amazon Prime) which is rather nice considering what Gigabyte has built into this entry level board. This makes for a quality motherboard on the X99 platform for the budget minded who don’t need all the bells and whistles of a high end motherboard.

The motherboard has a nice matte black finish to the PCB with some gold colored decals on the VRM and Southbridge heatsinks which combined with the yellow lighting around the audio controller area makes for a rather nice looking motherboard especially when running. The motherboard’s cooling consists of two newly designed heatsinks, each cooling the motherboard’s VRM and Southbridge, respectively and connected by a small nickel-plated copper heat-pipe. There are eight RAM slots which are black and grey in alternating slots and can support up to 128GB of memory. The four PCIe slots, RAM slots as well as the socket pins are gold plated which allows for good connectivity and protection against corrosion over time.