As with all enthusiast grade motherboards worthy of the title ‘enthusiast grade’ the X99-SLI comes with two main ways of overclocking: software and BIOS. The software option is of course a touch more limited than what full on manual overclocking can offer but by the same token the included software is still darn good at its job. More to the point the software option is tailor made for consumers who do not want to spend a lot of time messing with esoteric settings. Instead they can simply press a button, sit back and enjoy near instant gratification of a 4.4Ghz setting on all cores, and XMP profile enabled. The only thing is it does leave the uncore at stock levels.
There is a lot to be said for the software option but for enthusiasts the only ‘real’ overclocking is manual overclocking. In this area the X99-SLI did impress us. After all this is a more value orientated motherboard (yes that is rather ironic considering this board costs north of $250…but it’s nevertheless true) and yet not once did we feel that its lower asking price resulted in subpar abilities.
Put simply the combination of robust power delivery system with a BIOS filled with all the tuning settings you could ask for is a winning one. It is for this reason we had no troubles whatsoever hitting the same overclock as what our ASUS X99 TUF Sabertooth could do. That is to say we turned a 5930K CPU into a 4.5Ghz CPU, with the UNcore set to 4.0Ghz. Equally impressive is on the RAM side of the equation we turned our DDR4-2666 into DDR-2800 with very, very little effort. The end result was a system that can not only feed your need for speed but do so without worries over longevity!
GA-X99-SLI – Onboard Audio Performance
To test a motherboard’s onboard audio solution’s abilities we have used RightMark Audio Analyzer.
This board simply rocks when it comes to pumping out crystal clear audio. This is not all that surprising as Gigabyte was one of the first to offer motherboards with removable op-amps and electronically separated sound solutions, and as such have plenty of experience with creating killer good audio. More to the point this onboard soundcard is more than good enough for most consumers and it will only be audiophiles who will still cling to their PCI or PCIe based soundcards. For everyone else, this board will offer significant improvements over what a three year old motherboard could even dream of doing. Color us impressed.
