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Gigabyte Z97X-SOC FORCE Motherboard Review

Motherboards/Intel S1150 by leeghoofd @ 2014-07-22

Gigabyte continues to release new products in their orange themed overclocking motherboard series. The first of the OC series was the immaculate X58 OC motherboard, a trimmed down on features board, however purely designed to provide the ultimate overclocking experience. Sadly the X58 OC board arrived just a tad too late on the market to become a major selling product. Nevertheless a trend was set: deliver affordable, yet customized for maximum tweaking potential motherboard series. Other brands had similar overclocking friendly boards yet retailing at far more elevated prices. The predecessor, the Z87X-OC was one of the most utilized overclocking boards during the last year according statistics expert Massman from HWBot.org. Gigabyte had to live up to its name and make the Z97X-SOC FORCE as good or preferably even better…

Test Setup and Stock Methodology

Especially since the release of Sandy Bridge, Intel's first Socket 1155, most hardware vendors are no longer respecting the Intel specifications regarding the Turbo policy; most were imposing the same Turbo ratio to all the cores instead. This makes the lives of us the reviewers even harder as we needed to adapt our reviewing method. With Haswell nothing has really changed, however finding it very weird that some other hardware websites list they are using out of the box boards with no BIOS alterations whatsoever besides loading the usual XMP profile. There are big differences between some brands dear reviewers.

For our stock tests we go out of the box and just go into the BIOS and load the XMP profile for our 16GB Dual channel CORSAIR Vengeance Pro kit. No other interaction is done besides disabling the Audio chip and LAN port.

The hardware setup comprises out of:

Intel i7-4770K cooled by EK WB L240 kit
Intel DZ87KLT Mainboard
ASRock OC Formula
Gigabyte Z87X-OC
Gigabyte Z97X-SOC FORCE (F6 bios)
MSI Z87 XPOWER
16GB CORSAIR Vengeance Pro 2400C10 Dual Channel kit
ATI HD7970 GPU
CORSAIR AX1200 PSU
Western Digital Green Caviar 1TB HDD

For the overclocked tests we swap the Vengeance Pro RAMs with the high end 8GB Corsair Dominator Platinum 2800C11 kit. The Intel i7-4770K processor will be overclocked to 4500MHz and the uncore raised to 4000MHz. The memory main timings are tightened from 11-14-14-31 to 11-13-13-31, requiring a small bump in voltage to stabilize.

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