Gigabyte X99-Gaming 5P Review

Performance Analysis

In much the same way that we saw with the Gigabyte X99M-Gaming 5 and Gigabyte GA-X99-UD4P, the X99-Gaming 5P didn't offer a noticeable punch in most of our benchmarks at stock speed, instead putting in a solid performance that drifted to mediocre on occasions. With XMP enabled, the CPU sat at 3.5GHz, but if you don't apply this, it will rarely boost above 3.2GHz so if you're keen to see the best speeds and aren't overclocking, this is definitely worth looking at.

Overclocking didn't hit lofty regions but then our test chip isn't stunning either, with 4.3GHz, which is what the X99-Gaming 5P achieved, being a fairly standard result. This yielded some very worthwhile improvements in our benchmarks too, although again it was some way short of the top spots.


Storage performance was right on the money and only a few megabytes a second adrift of the best results - hardly worth worrying about. For an E-ATX motherboard, the X99-Gaming 5P had a surprisingly low power drawer at stock speed of just 96W at idle for the system as a whole, and even more impressive was the load power of 222W - the lowest on test.


Finally, we get to the audio numbers and we have to say they we thought something was wrong here. The results are practically off the chart and akin to a decent discrete sound card. All three of our RightMark benchmarks pointed at a highly capable audio processor - in fact, the results were so impressive that we reinstalled Windows and tried various different settings to check our results weren't flawed. This isn't totally unsurprising, though; while both of Gigabyte's previous X99 efforts we've looked at were medeocre when it came to audio, the GA-Z97N-Gaming 5 still holds the top spot for overall audio performance in our Z97-based testing.

Conclusion

The comparatively high price of the X99-Gaming 5P is arguably justified by the superb onboard audio. It's head and shoulders above every other motherboard we've tested, at least as far as RightMark's Audio Analyser can tell us and so far it's been pretty consistent. The price of around £210-230 when this article was published makes it one of the more affordable X99 motherboards out there. To get close in terms of audio performance, ASRock's Fatal1ty X99M Killer is cheaper but still a long way off, while Asus's Sabertooth X99 is also good, has a bunch more features but is much more expensive.

Audio aside, though, the X99-Gaming 5P is rather mediocre. While the onboard lighting is welcome and the layout is good both in terms of port placement and the double-spacing of the first two primary 16x PCI-E slots for better air cooling, it lacks a number of other useful features. Its main competitors are possibly Asus's X99-Pro, which has most of these features thrown in, has decent if not godlike audio performance and looks good too, while MSI's X99S MPower offers additional features and costs less as well. The result basically boils down to how important audio quality is - if you're not using a discrete sound card and this sits at the top of your list of requirements, X99-Gaming 5P is currently your best option.