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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…

3D Results

By popular demand we updated the 3D tests with more recent game titles. hence why initially the charts will look kinda empty till we receive more OC boards in the office. We retested the ASRock Z87 OC Formula board and will keep that as a reference score.

We included two outputs for the Z97X SOC FORCE board:

Stock results with the i7-4770K at Intel specs and the Vengeance Pro 2400C10 kit
OC'ed results with the i7-4770K@4500MHz and the tweaked CORSAIR Dominator Plats@2800C11-13-13-31

First up two synthetic titles: Futuremark 3D11 (as it is a lot dependant on well dialed-in BIOS) and the freeware Resident Evil 6 Benchmark.

As in the 2D tests the Gigabyte board can compete with the other offerings in the charts. We already included results of the upcoming review of the MSI Z97 XPower board; in typical MSI style the memory settings are very aggressive which usually yields tiny gains versus the competitors. Minor manual intervention in the Gigabyte bios will put the board at the same level without a doubt. The overclocked results provide a good boost for the 3Dmark11 test, however as can seen below in the game tests usually the limiting factor is and remains the graphics card. There are a few exceptions were an overclocked CPU can provide a significant boost in a game title, though these are very limited. Rule of thumb remains: the lower the resolution or detail level the bigger the importance of the processor. The more detail is applied the bigger the role of the utilized graphics adapter will be.

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