GIGABYTE GA-AX370GAMING 5
Sleek, simple, classy
GIGABYTE IS THE KING of value when it comes to motherboards. Its crisp, sharp PCBs provide almost everything you could want, at a price that makes its competitors weep. It won our Z170 mobo roundup with its Gaming 5, and would have undoubtedly grabbed a victory among Z270 boards, too, if we’d delved into that minor update. Can the same be said for AMD’s latest platform?
Well, it’s off to a good start. The design is undeniably clean: The satin white finish on the heatsinks and rear I/O shield, coupled with the brushed aluminum and black PCB certainly make it look the part. The LED lighting is a little less subtle than we’d like, dotted around the VRMs near the socket, the onboard audio, PCIe slots, and DRAM. But the biggest block is the oddly transparent, jagged strip running down toward the neatly placed U.2 and SATA ports. Fortunately, you can remove it, or design your own piece of shiny acrylic to cover the LED-touting side. Or just switch it off. Yes, do that—switch off those RGB rainbows, for humanity’s sake.
Alas, when it comes to performance, the Gaming 5 took a little tweaking. The default BIOS failed to support our 3,000MT/s overclock, forcing us to clock down to 2,666 until we got the new AGESA BIOS later on. That aside, it scores fairly well in all our performance tests, being within 1 percent of the Asus Crosshair VI Hero in almost everything—except a slightly higher power draw. What really impressed was the phenomenally tight memory latency. AIDA64 saw latencies as low as 83ns, outperforming all the other boards on test.
We also cranked up the overclock to 4GHz, as is the norm for our Ryzen 7 1800X. But when it came to undervolting, the Gaming 5 came undone. This was the first board on which we managed to kill a chip in this test. Admittedly, our mistake—during our undervolt testing, instead of placing the chip under 1.18V of V Core, we put it under 1.8V. Before proceeding to boot into Windows and benchmark the crap out of it. It was only when we heard the fan ramp up, and noticed the clock speeds registering at 1GHz, that we realized what had occurred. We switched off the machine and returned to stock voltages in BIOS. Alas, one restart later, and poof—no more display. Yes, it was an error on our part, but it could have been prevented by overvoltage protection in the BIOS, a feature included in Asus’s Crosshair VI Hero and MSI’s XPower Gaming Titanium.
Ultimately, the Gaming 5 still offers great value, with solid stock performance, and looks that could kill. But if you’re tweaking those sweet overclocks, keep an eye on the voltage inputs, just in case.