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

TECHNOLOGY X TESTING PROTOCOL

Here at Technology X, we test our motherboards using hand-picked benchmarks. The benchmarks chosen are more synthetic, but still gives you a good idea of the performance of the Gigabyte X99-SLI. One thing to note is that our system has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide giving our system a boost in performance. BIOS settings such as all C-states have been disabled as well as EIST (Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology) for this testing.

TECHNOLOGY X TEST BENCH SET UP

As seen the components are laid out on a table, this is our preference as we use this method to test many parts without the hassle of a case set up and in preparation of LN2 testing. A large thank you and a great amount of appreciation goes out to those manufacturers who help make this build possible, notably Thermaltake, G.Skill and Gigabyte. All components used can be purchased at most stores, as well as online.

OVERCLOCKING

In our overclocking test we use AIDA64’s ‘System Stability Test’ so we can verify and test our overclocking results. We did however use CPU-Z to show our system over ADIA64’s CPUID since the motherboard was not listed.

Our Intel Core I7-5960X is a very nice sample with stability at 4.5GHz core and 4GHz Cache with only 1.2V. We would expect the average CPU to require around 1.3 – 1.35V for this clock. We were very pleased that this motherboard overclocked to this speed with ease. This goes to show that for ambient cooling you do not always require a high end motherboard. You will also notice that we used a 125MHz strap as our RAM is rated at 3000MHz; this is because RAM of this speed is more stable using a strap than the normal 100MHz base clock. Check out our review of the Intel Core i7 5960X CPU and the G.Skill Ripjaws 4 DDR4-3000MHz RAM used in this report.