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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…

OCed 2D Results

First up some daily air overclocking results. Instead of bumping up the CPU multiplier to 45X, we also set the CORSAIR RAMs at 2800MHz C11-13-13-31 2T and tighten the secondary and tertiary timings to put some extra stain on the Integrated Memory Controller too. This tweaking takes some time and can vary depending on the motherboard, processor and memory being used.

i7-4770K@4500MHz 1.25Vcore

CORSAIR 2800C11-13-13-31 2T (tweaked from SPD C11-14-14-31)

Why only 4500MHz ? Well our retail CPU is not comparable with all the Intel ES CPUs we see popping up on most websites. Party fooling people 5GHz daily can be done at 1.3Vcore... Great for who have these samples, but you the readers will be so utterly disappointed if your brand new CPU can't even reach a rock solid 4600MHz stable at 1.3Vcore. Maybe with one out of 100 retails you can manage the same speeds as the ES versions. Our i7-4770K retail is very average in daily OC and voltage (1.25Vcore), however just gets too hot at anything over 4600MHz when being used for a longer period. Delidding and re-applying the thermal paste would unleash a far higher OC potential for sure.

Especially after properly tuning the RTL values this Gigabyte board really starts to fly in SuperPI 32M; even without it would be still joining the stronger boards in the front row in the lineup. It is pretty cool to see how much time is now spend by the BIOS engineers to properly tune the BIOSes. Take note these results were done on the latest official Bios F6. No Beta nor Extreme BIOSes are being used for these daily overclock tests.

No matter what you throw at these modern boards, being it single threaded or multi threaded none of these top notch boards will let you down. Differences are minimal and a lot of users will opt for a board depending on the specifications, added features, the package combo, the looks and the hype created around the board. Of course the retail price and component choice will be a determining factor for OCers and this where the ATX form factor Gigabyte Z97X-SOC FORCE has close to no competition.

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