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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…

LN2 Fun Fun Fun

Time to put the board to the test what is was designed for, extreme liquid nitrogen overclocking!

Gigabyte has provided overclockers with an OC friendly bios: the X04. Almost no voltage adjustments need to be made as everything is being maxed at the AUTO setting. One just still needs to adjust the Vcore, Vring and SA/IO voltages and your are good to go. Absolutely no need to waste your time with loadlines etc, set clocks and bench hard! The brand new X06 is not yet available to the masses.

We have spend many many hours with the Z97X SOC FORCE board and till now it has been a very easy board to work with. Especially the Gigabyte Tweak Launcher software makes in Windows adjustments so freaking easy.

Especially the hot keys are excellent, allowing you to switch if needed during the benchmark

Okay the PSC memory training remains problematic, though if one selects the 1.25 strap and the 2200MHZ RAM divider one can easily clock up. Efficiency might be a tiny bit off, due to the looser RTLs; nevertheless the Samsung memories work spot on, 2800Mhz at C9 works as a charm.

Here are some results on the Gigabyte Z97X-SOC FORCE featuring a wide variety of CPUs:

The limiting factor will not be the board but the other hardware components :)

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