Gadgetory

welcome to one of the most crazytown motherboard overviews I have ever done to start with most of these features are things that I can't even validate without sub-zero cooling and a lot more overclocking skill than I possess and things I've never had any need for so most of you won't either but the gigabyte z97 X SOC force does so many things differently that I think it merits a pretty in-depth video the CM storm SF 17 uses a massive 18 centimeter fan to cool your gaming notebook and it adds a four port USB hub click now to learn more included in the box are the usual suspects including a manual driver disk 2-way SLI bridge crossfire bridge IO shield and four SATA cables then a couple of things that are a little bit more unique first up is adapters for the voltage check points that can be used to measure anything from standard stuff like CPU core voltage to some obscure stuff that I've never even heard of let alone felt the need to measure and an OC brace a metal bracket that supports your expansion cards so they don't flop over if you're testing on an open platform or just putting it on top of the box neato moving on to the board itself it features a catchy orange and black color scheme with a matte black PCB and silver accents four gigabytes company branding and ultra durable branding now in the past gaming features and overclocking features were often synonymous and any high-end board would have the full complement of both but this trend has started to change somewhat with the release of gaming boards that have no CPU overclocking capabilities at all and overclocking boards that gotta skimp on the gaming stuff so with this board it's somewhere in the middle and I'm gonna do two separate physical tours one for the general user and gaming features that make the product usable for folks who just want to build a normal PC with it and one for the overclocking features that only the hardcores are really gonna care about so at the center of the board is an LG 1150 socket with support for Haswell and Haswell refresh Intel Core Series CPUs with power provided by an 8 + 4 pin power setup going through an eight phase-- digital drm solution with custom black capacitors rated to operate for 10,000 hours at 105 degrees Celsius they collectively can handle up to 40 amps of current to the CPU Wow moving over we've got four ddr3 memory slots that run in dual channel with support for up to ddr3 33 hundred megahertz memory listed on the spec sheet and then next up is one of the most feature dense chunks of motherboard PCB that I have ever seen the on-board debug display is great for reading post codes and diagnosing random issues the OC turbo button loads a pre-configured overclocking profile for OneTouch basic optimization the onboard power button is great for folks like me who often use boards without a case the clear CMOS button lets you clear bad settings that you are that are keeping the board from booting and the dual BIOS which may save your bacon if a BIOS update gets interrupted at some point and you need to rescue your board without sending it in to be serviced everything else here is very overclocking oriented so we'll come back to it later the 24 pin power is in its ideal location which leads us to storage since there's not much else to say about that we've got the option to use either six standard SATA 3 16 bit per second drives or four of those and a single SATA Express 10 gigabit per second drive SATA Express is a new standard that is backwards compatible with existing SATA drives but can use a PCI Express over a cable for improved latency and throughput there aren't really any drives yet but when new two-and-a-half-inch SSDs arrived using this connector they will be able to deliver better sequential performance than previous models further down we've got a couple of onboard USB ports these are great for test bench juice or even for normal use if you had something like an encryption key or a USB bluetooth adapter that you basically wanted to have plugged in all the time and not have it be in the way on the back of the machine and then to the left to this front USB 3 header isn't really great but I understand why it's not on the right with all the fancy stuff that's going on their front audio is plugged into the standard header on the separated PCB that makes up the bottom left on the board you can tell that gigabyte has physically separated the traces because this blank PCB line will be illuminated when the system is powered on this slightly reduces interference for cleaner onboard audio and that combined with a pretty hefty amplifier and Realtek ALC 1150 audio codec should make the audio solution on the sport actually pretty darn solid especially for an overclocking oriented board next up we've got PCI Express slots the board supports four-way crossfire or two-way SLI with a single PCIe 1x slot that will get covered even if you just have a single graphics card installed and then a couple of old-school PCI slots rounding out expansion of note here is the 6 pin PCI Express female connector above those slots that you'll want to plug in if you're running more than two graphics cards to make sure that you don't burn out your 24-pin connector rear i/o is pretty standard fare with 4 USB 2.0 ports VGA DVI DisplayPort and HDMI output for the onboard video optical audio out a ps2 keyboard mouse combo port something I do still like to see 4 USB 3 ports a killer e 2200 Gigabit LAN port that does support networking prioritization and then finally that 7.1 audio that I was talking about before then shifting back to the inside the onboard fan headers are located here here here here here here here and here so there are a total of eight of them meaning that even some of the most ludicrous systems actually won't need to use anything outside of the onboard headers to power up all the fans which leads us pretty well into one of the more exotic features of this board here's one for you OC ignition powers the motherboard and connected components like fans while the system shut down this is great for maintaining air flow to combat condensation and reduce cold bug issues for extreme overclocking and it's also great for building demo systems that just need to look nice and look like they're running but don't actually need to work the OC tag button lets you configure your favorite customize settings in the BIOS then apply them with OneTouch the OC touch buttons let you manually raise and lower the CPU multiplier base clock speed and the rate at which they change using hardware buttons the memory safe button runs relaxed RAM timing settings to help eliminate memory compatibilities when you're first booting up the boards you can get into the BIOS and make changes speaking of getting into the BIOS the direct to BIOS button lets you boot right into the BIOS without pressing delete when you boot up the system the settings lock button remembers your last successful settings even if you clear the C Mouse which is kind of cool so you can like you can like override your settings and then you can override clearing the override and then there's like another one that actually lets you override that by that's the C bat switch by removing the battery from the board just with a button and doing a full clear so it's like crazytown the dual BIOS which enables or disables gigabytes dual BIOS something I would suggest that you actually leave on and then there's a BIOS switch that lets you manually switch between which physical BIOS chip you are working off this can be great for diagnosing issues and for analyzing performance between multiple firmware revisions the OC trigger switch lets you boot up with a safe easy setting then engage it to jump to an aggressive frequency only during your benchmark run and the PCI Express dip switches let you turn the PCIe 16x slots on and off for easy diagnosis of issues when running multiple cards this is a fantastic feature for water coolers as well as extreme overclockers when it can be kind of a bear to get a card out and find out which one is causing the system to be flaky and then they've got another related one also dip switches but this time for the dim slot so you can switch slots on and off one at a time for finding out which one runs the best or for figuring out if there's a flaky stick when you're doing diagnosis without actually physically taking them out so that's pretty much it other than the usual gigabyte you know ultra durable you know great build quality thick copper PCB glass fabric humidity resistance stuff thank you for watching my overview video of the z97 x SOC force and just like with all of my videos you can find a link with pricing and availability that includes my affiliate code in the video description under the light share and dislike buttons which I'd love for you to use accordingly also in the video description is a support link where you can give us a monthly contribution by t-shirt or change 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