Layout

At a first glance the Gigabyte X99M-Gaming 5 leaves a very good impression with its good looking design. The manufacturer decided to go for a combination of black and red with some white accents, which suites nicely and in the end you get an aesthetic looking product. The layout itself is well thought and there is for example plenty of space around the CPU socket to install even todays largest CPU coolers. The fact that there are SATA connectors which have been angled by 90 degrees allows for an easy installation of oversized graphics cards. Meanwhile Gigabyte is using very similarly shaped cooling blocks on all motherboards in order to unify the design language. The only thing that gets changed is the color.





The Gigabyte X99M-Gaming 5 comes with a digital 6+4 phase power design, whereas the CPU is backed up by six phases and the memory by four. Like we've already explained on the features page Gigabyte is making use of an extensive solution. Regarding the CPU VRM there are IR3556 phases from International Recitifier, wheras every single phase can cope with up to 50A load. There are also inductors from Coiltronics, which go by the name FLAT-PAC 76A. These coils filter the VRM signal before it gets filtered again by a set of nine 10k black caps from Chemi-Con.
A quick look at the power stage, that is taking care of the DIMM slots reveals there are two IR3570A chips, offering 3+2 phases and they're being combined with four IR3553, which can be loaded with up to 40A. This is definitely more than sufficient for a DRAM power stage.





Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the Gigabyte X99M-Gaming 5. Officially supported are DDR4 3000 (O.C.) / 2800 (O.C.) / 2666 (O.C.) / 2400 (O.C.) / 2133 (O.C.). There is enough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you wont encounter compatibility problems with big coolers even when you choose to install RAM with big heatspreaders. Also supported are Xtreme Memory Profiles (XMP) in version 2.0.


On the X99M-Gaming 5 PCH as well as current converters got separate cooling blocks. Gigabyte decided to connect two VRM coolers with a heatpipe in order to improve heat transport. Other than that the weight of this board is quite high, which is partially due to cooling blocks. Subjectively speaking a high weight is a first indicator for a quality motherboard.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 4 - Layout
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 5 - Connectors and I/O
Page 3 - Features	Page 6 - Conclusion