Conclusion
GIGABYTE Z690 GAMING X DDR4
I know many people are going to wonder why bother with a Z690 motherboard. The fact is, a Z690 motherboard can be had at discounts right now and functionally, the Z790 chipset has very little to offer on a DDR4 setup. On a DDR5 system, you gain increased memory clocks which would be nice. However, that’s only going to matter if you are really pushing those clocks up past DDR5 6000MHz. I’ve been able to do DDR5 5600MHz or better on most configurations.
For the most part, my time with the GIGABYTE Z690 GAMING X DDR4 was absolutely fantastic barring some quirks of finding my way around the UEFI. Aside from that the GIGABYTE Z690 GAMING X DDR4 was relatively easy to work with and quite pleasant to handle. The quality of the board was very impressive given the price point. I’ve worked with a lot of very pricey boards and the GIGABYTE Z690 GAMING X DDR4 punches way above that in terms of the way it feels in the hand. The heat sinks are very nice and add an air of quality and presentation to the overall package.
Performance
As you can see from our benchmarks, the GIGABYTE Z690 GAMING X DDR4 performed as well or often better than the much more expensive ASUS ROG Z690 APEX and ASUS ROG Z690 EXTREME. I can only surmise that’s DDR5 latency at work there but nevertheless, the numbers back that assertion up even if I’m wrong about the cause. That being said, the overall performance was quite good and it was drama free aside from the one setup issue I already covered. I never had any more BSODs, lockups, or other issues.
I did a lot of things I wouldn’t ordinarily do with a test bench system trying to ensure that the extremely poor DPC latency values I was seeing weren’t indicative of an actual problem. I felt like I got a lot of extra hands-on time with the GIGABYTE Z690 GAMING X DDR4 and it performed extremely well and was what you’d want in terms of stability.
Overclocking
I don’t really want to get into the whole “overclocking is dead” business as that’s not entirely true. However, manually tuning a 12900K to 5.1GHz often takes a great deal of effort for very little payoff. The fact is most people are probably going to run it using the GIGABYTE values or they will enforce Intel’s power limits if their cooling is subpar, so that’s what we did here. I would like to revisit this board with a 12600 non-K or something and see if it’s as good as some of those other boards that were accomplishing amazing things with those but that’s probably not in the cards at this stage.
Final Points
When it’s all said and done, would I recommend the GIGABYTE Z690 GAMING X DDR4? You bet I would. I work with a lot of expensive boards and my personal tastes tend to lean in that direction. However, the GIGABYTE Z690 GAMING X DDR4 was literally everything you can ask for in a budget board. It has a solid feature set. It’s well-made and aesthetically pleasing. It is one of those less-is-more types of motherboards that is a joy to work with from start to finish. It’s an amazing board that ticks all the boxes.
If you are looking for an LGA 1700 motherboard on the cheap, you owe it to yourself to give the GIGABYTE Z690 GAMING X DDR4 a serious look. It is a phenomenal board.
