Gigabyte Silently Reveals Green Z97X-Game Plus Motherboard

Silently, Gigabyte launched the product page for its Z97X-Game Plus motherboard. Although the Z97 chipset launched about a year ago, this is actually the first Z97 board with a black and green theme – something that's been sought after for quite a while.

Aside from the colors, Gigabyte stuck with a fairly straightforward board design. The LGA1150 socket is wired to four DDR3 memory slots, along with three PCI-Express 3.0 16x slots, three PCI-Express 1x slots, and a single legacy PCI slot. There is one M.2 slot capable of pushing 10 GB/s (meaning it's wired to two PCI-Express 2.0 lanes), and a single SATA-Express interface (which can turn into two SATA3 ports) with four more SATA3 ports.

Rear I/O is handled by two old-school PS/2 ports, VGA, DVI, HDMI, four USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and 7.1 channel HD audio outputs. 

In terms of gaming-oriented functionality, the board eschews the Intel NIC that's integrated into the chipset in favor of a Killer E2200 NIC. Additionally, it comes with Gigabyte's AMP-UP audio circuitry, which is essentially higher-grade audio hardware with a decent headphone amplifier and a Realtek ALC1150 115dB SNR DAC.

The board itself, aside from the black and green theme, isn't all that remarkable. True, it does come quite well-equipped, but there are no features aside from its theme that, when taken as a whole, make it stand out from the rest of the boards in its segment. Even so, that doesn't make the Z97X-Game Plus a bad purchase. The gear on it is good stuff, and you'll have one heck of a pretty board to work with. Pair this together with NZXT's Razer-branded H440, and you can build yourself a very, very pretty machine.

Unfortunately, a Gigabyte rep informed us that the company has no plans to bring the board to the U.S. market. That's a shame, because we really could use a black and green Z97 board. Sure, it's late, but better late than never. If Gigabyte does change its mind, we're probably looking at a $150-ish price tag.

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Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

  • shrapnel_indie
    Product page link is dead:

    "Sorry, the page you are looking for is no longer available or has been moved."
    Reply
  • jasonelmore
    why go through all that trouble to design and manufacture this motherboard, and not be willing to ship it to the USA?
    Reply
  • jasonelmore
    with all english text all over the board for that matter
    Reply
  • thundervore
    Its great to see Black/Green coming back again. I am so sick of the Red/Black everyone is doing, it gets annoying so fast
    Reply
  • Shankovich
    Ah yes, the G1 Sniper colour scheme. Still loving my G1 sniper M3 :)
    Reply
  • beoza
    Would be nice to see other colors on motherboards besides the standard Orange, This black and green color looks good! Always liked this color scheme on a motherboard, although once you place your GPU(s) and memory it's a bit hard to see. Need some blues and greens, heck even a purple color would look good with black. One of these motherboard manufacturers should offer their mid or high end boards in different color schemes; same board just available in different colors. It would help to set themselves apart from the rest of the pack since most of the motherboards out there all have very similar features.
    Reply
  • shrapnel_indie
    15867863 said:
    Ah yes, the G1 Sniper colour scheme. Still loving my G1 sniper M3 :)

    On the Z87 boards. They updated to the en vogue red and black on the z97 boards. But even that doesn't really do a whole lot of justice for a blue/black case.... if it even matters depending on where you place your tower.
    Reply
  • MasterDell
    why go through all that trouble to design and manufacture this motherboard, and not be willing to ship it to the USA?

    Because that would make sense.
    Reply
  • convertedconsolegamer_92
    Green Heatsinks would have perfected the look. This board would go great with that MSI GTX 960/970 100ME card. Shame Gigabyte felt pressured to compete with MSI gaming series. The sniper should have been green.
    Reply
  • alexscheppert
    why oh why is the G1 gaming board not the same color scheme as the GPU's.
    Reply