Gadgetory

by a qualifying Intel product and get entered in the Intel dynamic ticket giveaway for a chance to win great prizes visit Intel gaming promo com to learn more welcome to my unboxing an overview of a product that's probably designed more for people who don't pay for hardware than for people who actually buy their own hardware so it is expensive and over built to the point where it's hardly even practical unless you're one of those guys who's going for every possible frequency record whether it's on CPU or memory or whatever else and it farted or whatever else the case may be this is the z87 x OC force from gigabyte a proud continuation of the OC board traditions of orange slots black PCBs a beautiful aesthetics and over built design so we've got a 2-way SLI bridge a 3-way SLI bridge a four-way SLI bridge a 16 Way SLI have no I'm just kidding actually this is really cool so this is what they're calling the OC brace and it is basically a way to attach PCI brackets to the back of the board when it's on a test bench to support your cards so they don't lean over I mean that is so cool it's the kind of thing that no one who actually pays for hardware and put some motherboard inside a case will ever care about but Lee come on that's so cool I love it anyway two-way crossfire bridge V checkpoint adapter so you can monitor your voltages I'll show you those on the motherboard itself six SATA cables looks like yeah three a right angle three straight connectors and tenez for the built-in Wireless so there you go wireless n as well as Bluetooth card so that's a PCIe 1x card you could install it in this board you could buy this board install it in some other board wouldn't matter it's just a proper piece yet you one X card front panel three and a half inch Bay USB 3.0 doohickey um there's some kind of USB cable for probably something uh yeah that's right that's for the Wi-Fi cards and then we've got an i/o shield as well as all the documentation that you can conveniently find on the Internet's which to my understanding is something to do with tubes or something like that which leads us to the motherboard itself want to take you guys on a tour I actually had someone tell me sockets or sockets not that long ago when I was doing a video and I was saying how gigabyte has their whole 15 micro gold-plated CPU memory PCI Express pin thing going on and the truth of the matter is that no not all sockets are manufactured and provided by Intel and there are more expensive and less expensive socket implementations that the manufacturers can put on their motherboards so gigabyte has gone ahead and called out that they have a better socket for the CPU as well as for memory and the PCI Express slots they've also implemented a very high current eight pin plus four pin design this is only going to be relevant if you're the kind of person who is even capable of using a board like this to its maximum potential and speaking of using the board to its maximum potential you have the option to either use air cooling or liquid cooling so the vrm cooler is using a hybrid design so you can turn on this fan which gigabyte claims is silent but I'm gonna go ahead and call them on that one because small fans are never silent or you can disable it completely or just take it off this is what I would probably do and use the 3/8 inch integrated barbs to liquid cool the vrm which would be very very sweet around the CPU socket we find the vrm design which is extremely beefy on this board using all international rectifier brand components for the PWM as well as the ICS although most of that is hidden by the cooling solution here you can also see that whether it's here around the CPU socket or in other parts of the board is using all what gigabyte is calling their durable black solid caps so it's all kind of part of the overall ultra durable branding that gigabyte has which refers to their 2 ounce copper PCB their glass fabric PCB design that improves humidity resistance as well as generally the use of better quality components which is useful not only from a better performance perspective because if you guys saw our recent video comparing a high-performance ATX board to an ITX board performance wise there might not be that much of a difference but there can be a longevity difference in a stability difference when we're talking about pushing things to the absolute limit I mean the board must have every possible on board button reset power OneTouch overclocking with the turbo button the tag button recalls a favorite setting that you set up within the BIOS the ignition button I can't even remember what that one does is allows you to jump allows you to keep the power on to the motherboard even once it is turned off so there are a variety of reasons overclockers might want to do this particularly not wanting the components to get too cold and have condensation form in an out-of-control fashion you've also got m base clock up and down as well as multiplier up and down and a gear button that changes the ratios of up and down miss for the other functionality and finally the Facebook button which allows you to fire up Facebook and tell your other social media followers all about your overclocking x-points no that's not actually what this does that is the trigger button which allows you to set up your benchmarking run you're ready to go boom boom boom okay at a nice low stable frequency flip the button boom you're running at your extreme frequency then once your benchmark run is done flip it back and now it's stable enough to submit your scores and all that you've got all of your voltage check points whether it's 4 v core video of the etc etc etc as well as an onboard post debug LED the 24 pin connectors it's an ideal location along the right-hand edge and the front USB 3 connectors and it's almost ideal location on the right-hand edge but not in a right angle configuration this is cool right here these are PCI Express switches that allow you to actually turn on and off different PCI Express laws these can be great for diagnosing issues whether you're on an open test bench and there's the doorbell or whether you are just have something like a complex water cooling setup on your board and you're trying to figure out what's going wrong and it's a lot easier to turn off a PCI Express slot than it is to pull a graphics card also related to the PCI Express slots is this extra Ares SATA connector if you're installing more than two graphics cards plug a SATA connector in there and it'll give you a little bit extra power for those cards in those slots we've got six SATA three six gigabit per second ports powered by the Intel controller and then four more powered by Marvell controller then finally we've got a CMOS clear switch down here on the bottom right and more fan headers we'll cover those later front panel connectors for if you are installing this board in an actual case another front USB 3 header 2 front USB 2 headers a comm port of all things and front panel audio although there isn't a particularly high end audio implementation on this board unlike the more gaming optimized board from their g1 series so this is really overclocking optimized not necessarily gaming optimized now I want to point out where all the fan connectors are on this board so we've got two up here on the top not a whole lot down the right-hand edge so there's basically just one here so that's three total now and boom high concentration on the bottom two more four five one more four six another two four eight and finally the ninth one is over here at the back which is great if you have a rear 120 millimeter fan that you want to install it on the PCI Express configuration is very very ample so gigabyte is using a switching solution in order to achieve 4x or rather 8 X 8 X 8 X 8 X bandwidth required for 4-way crossfire or four-way SLI configurations so you can put pretty much whatever graphics cards you could possibly want on this particular board once we get around to the rear i/o we find 2 USB to ports 2 HDMI ports DisplayPort a ps2 keyboard mouse combo port 6 USB 3.0 ports optical audio out 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports and 7.1 audio out although most overclockers probably won't even care about the audio out I think I missed the memory support so of course it supports dual channel ddr3 memory up to 8 gig dims at this point in time and pretty much any speed you could possibly see fit to put in it remember though the maximum speed achievable particularly on the Haswell platform is going to be determined by your CPUs integrated memory controller as well as the frequency pushing for on your cpu because the higher that frequency goes the lower your max memory overclock will be unless you happen to be particularly talented thank you for checking out this unboxing and overview of the z87 XOC force from gigabyte I think I actually missed one very important thing here and that is the dedicated switch to go between the two biases on this board so if you do happen to brick something or it just sort of the power goes out in the middle of a flash you will be able to recover it like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you were somewhere in between and as always don't forget to subscribe