Gigabyte G1 Sniper Z97 Review

[section_title title=”Overclocking”]Overclocking

With overclocking being one of my favourite parts of testing, I had high hopes of the Gigabyte G1 Sniper Z97 motherboard.  This is for two reasons, the first reason is that looks quite tasty with the red and black theme and the second being that Gigabyte have a good lineage with overclocking and it would be nice for one of their lower end boards to deliver the mustard.

As with most of our Intel motherboard reviews, I like to push them to their limits, which with Haswell, has mainly been with CPUs but due to my good CPU, I have been able to attribute the limitations to the motherboards, so our reviews will give you a better idea of what motherboards are capable than most.

As per my normal testing procedure I start off with a baseline overclock, the G1 Sniper managed 4.5GHz at 1.2v without any issues whatsoever, not requiring any major tweaks to the BIOS or any of the settings.  This is pretty much the gold standard for me but what surprised me even more, was the ability to hit 5GHz which was 100% stable.  I did need the full 1.4v to achieve this but the motherboard did manage to do it and I can only give kudos to Gigabyte for this.

This was achievable with 1.4v, changing the LLC (load line calibration) to the highest setting and boom, the Gigabyte G1 Sniper Z97 managed to hit 5GHz.  I did try to push for 5.1GHz but the motherboard didn’t want to know, not even with 1.45v (which you shouldn’t try, unless you have amazing cooling) which is pretty much the maximum voltage I would go to while using air/liquid cooling solutions.