Customer Ratings & Reviews

There isn't much I can say that hasn't already been said by other reviewers. Installation was a breeze with this puppy. I love the BIOS and the different HD GUI options that ship along with this board. This is a great deal, picked mine up with a 10% off coupon combined with some gift cards and reward zone points, so there's no chance I would've found it at a better price. I was actually pretty excited when I saw best buy had this combo on their site. Glad I decided to double check Best Buy for components before buying elsewhere! Thanks Best Buy! If I had a complaint, it's that this system boots so fast when combined with a ssd that it took me a bit to realize I was supposed to be hitting "DEL" instead of a function key to pull up the BIOS. The POST screen was a flash at best (and that's a problem I'm okay with having.) But that's a question that the Internet quickly answered. It was probably in the manual too, but I'm lazy.

My last processor had a minor issue with the heat sink getting slightly melty and fusing to the processor and motherboard. I've had this one for a month now, and it hasn't melted to anything yet, so that's nice. Also it's faster.

Performance of this motherboard+CPU is great. I am using it setup a water cooling PC and so far it's been performing flawlessly.

Received the products well ahead of lead time. Installation was a breeze partially due to the board's design. Very uncluttered, lots of room to breathe. Lots more for a good cable management job. Gigabyte's boards are set up in such a way that it takes almost all of the work out of a mild to moderate over clocking job, by basically grabbing the system by the neck and micromanaging everything. It is quite brilliant for newer users. The graphical BIOS makes more advanced tuning much simpler than before, letting you save various hardware profiles and more importantly, use your mouse. This is a big plus because keyboard controls inside of BIOS are a train wreck. Eight SATA ports and the ability to manage every one of them plus all USB headers as bootable devices? Big improvement over the older Z77 boards. The black polymer coating on the board isn't just for show, it's supposed to be a light duty thermal protection. But I find it helps me locate headers and their labels much faster than trying to read white print on a brightly colored textolite board with circuits all over it. The included processor is a beast even at base clock speeds. Capable of handling a dozen and a half instances of Native Instruments' Massive synth running out of REAPER, each with between one and four automated effects processors attached, three vocal tracks, live drum recording, and live guitar recording and realtime processing with a low enough latency that my musicians couldn't tell it wasn't live. The i7 is overkill for any traditional household computing task, which means longevity. It's sure to stay relevant for a long time. Pros- -relatively easy setup -good hardware match -simple firmware configuration -Excellent heat mitigation -good overall cost -dual BIOS makes experimenting less scary for new system builders, makes it extremely difficult to brick -print is easy to read -design has a very clean overall look -Z97 northbridge is forward compatible to gen-5 processors Cons- -terrible BIOS keyboard controls -audio track lighting is garish orange EL wire, which clashes terribly with my cyan case lights, cannot be customized to my knowledge -board does not include mounting screws, make sure not to lose any of your old ones. This is clearly intended for upgrades, not scratch builds.

My desktop was dead on 12/28 (would not even POST) and ordered this kit (and 16Gb of Corsair Pro Vengeance 1866Mhz memory) on 12/30. Even with New Years day had it delivered and installed on 1/2. Best part is it all fired up with my old Windows 7 installation. Popped in the CD to install the network drivers and was back online. Great features and very fast compared to my old rig (MSI Neo P45 / E8400). Do check the memory frequency in the Bios.