GIGABYTE boards get reviewed by a lot of website and most of them are pretty unique in their quest to find the right balance of testing the product and perhaps looking to assess how good the value and even functionality are. I found a review from PCGAMERS.NET.AU really interesting as they go into detail on the builds that they do with their PCs and talk about some of the interesting challenges and discoveries they find on the way and how that might help anyone else out there building their own machines. Not only that but this setup gets tested for a few months to really get the best overall experience. This review should be a must read for anyone looking for a nice and challenging miniITX gaming PC build with a beast Noctua NH-U14S 140mm air cooler and space to spare.
Here are a couple of quotes from the review, click on the link to read the entire article (well worth it).
Socket placement is great. I managed to fit the 140mm wide Noctua NH-U14S on this board in the Node 304 case without blocking the PCIE slot.
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Unlike the MSI Z97I Gaming board, the WIFI module was already installed and ready to go. The module works well and we saw performance that was on par if not better than other boards that we've tested in the same physical location. For gaming, the WIFI was fine and my ping stayed within a few ms of the LAN experience. I tested this by playing Battlefield 4, DayZ and Titanfall online with nothing else using our internet connection.
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The onboard gigabit LAN was solid, the Killer software seemed to prioritise correctly and performed as expected when it came to transfer speed (write) tests hitting 735Mbps writing/874Mbps reading to another PC's SSD share. The 5GHZ WIFI gave us almost 100Mbps with 88Mbps writing and 82Mbps reading.
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Working with the Gigabyte Z97N-Gaming 5 has been a lot of fun and it is great value. After 2 months, I haven't found myself wanting any feature that isn't included nor have I identified any shortcuts taken to keep the price down. This is a great LAN gaming board without any compromises.
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