Overall and Final Verdict
So now that I have spent time with the X99 SOC Champion we can sit down and talk a little about what sets it apart from the others as well as what issues it has. To start things off, I absolutely love the black and orange theme that this board has going on. Not only is it eye catching, but I feel that orange is really coming into the mainstream as far as PC highlight colors, in the past you would have to paint everything if you wanted any orange and you couldn’t even get lighting but now orange LEDs are easier to come by and we have cases, video cards, motherboards, and ram all in orange. The flat black finish is also sharp as well.
Beyond the aesthetics I was really happy to see Gigabyte go all out on the software and UEFI on the SOC Champion. My past experiences with Gigabyte boards have always had issues on the software side of things, It is great to see that they have invested a lot of time and money into competing there as well. Good software is hard to find and Gigabytes App Center and other programs are right up at the top with Asus’s software. Their UEFI is easy to get setup but still allows enthusiast to dig in and get into the old school settings as well once you get into the classic bios.
Performance in most of our testing was right on par with the competition. This includes getting into overclocking. I would have liked to of seen the auto software overclock to give a slightly higher stable clock speed, but it was still worlds above the MSI’s result and the EVGA board didn’t even have the feature at all. The support for 3400Mhz RAM and all of the other overclocking features put this right at the top of the charts for overclocking. Currently all of the other X99 boards on the market only officially support 3300MHz or less. Gigabyte made sure to go out of the way to work with Corsair to pair the board with a 3400MHz kit that pushes the limits of the board and also matches the colors. I tried to get my hands on a set to test it as well but didn’t have any luck.
The only performance issue I ran into was with our NIC and I suspect this is more of a defect in our sample than a representation of the board, especially considering the other three boards tested use the same NIC. Beyond that my only other nitpick with the board was the lack of a few extra USB ports and only having four DDR4 DIMMs, I would prefer to see eight. That said overclocking boards don’t really need ether of those.
While I don’t have it listed down in my Pros and Cons I also want to highlight the price of the X99 SOC Champion. It might not be the cheapest board, but when we compare it to the similarly featured X99 Classified board from EVGA the price really stands out. With the EVGA board I complained that it was priced up with the boards with tones of USB ports and other features, I feel like Gigabyte really hit the nail on the head. It isn’t priced as a budget board because it is a high end motherboard, but without some of the consumer features that aren’t needed in an overclocking board the price is able to stay a little lower.
Amazon Link: HERE
