buy a qualifying Intel product and get entered in the Intel Dynamic ticket
giveaway for a chance to win great prizes visit Intel gaming promo.com to
learn more welcome to my unboxing and overview of a product that's probably
designed more for people who don't pay for Hardware than for people who
actually buy their own Hardware so it is expensive and overbuilt to the point
where it's hardly even practical unless you're one of those guys who's going for
every possible frequency record whether it's on CPU or memory or whatever
else and it farted or whatever else the
case may be this is the z87x OC force
from Gigabyte a proud continuation of the OC board traditions of orange slots
black pcbs beautiful Aesthetics and
overbuilt design so we've got a two-way
SLI Bridge a three-way SLI Bridge a four-way
SLI Bridge a 16-way SLI no I'm just
kidding actually this is really cool so this is what they're calling the OC
brace and it is basically a way to attach PCI brackets to the back of the
board when it's on a test bench to support your cards so they don't lean
over I mean that is so cool it's the
kind of thing that no one one who actually pays for hardware and puts a motherboard inside a case will ever care
about but like come on that's so cool I love it anyway two-way Crossfire
Bridge uh V checkpoint adapter so you
can monitor your voltages I'll show you those on the motherboard itself six SATA
cables uh looks like yeah three right angle three straight connectors antennas
for the builtin wireless so there you go
Wireless N as well as Bluetooth card so
that's a PCI e1x card you could install it in this board you could buy this
board install it in some other board wouldn't matter it's just a proper PC
e1x card uh front panel 3 and 1/2 in Bay
USB 3.0 doohickey um some kind of USB cable for
probably something ah yeah that's right that's for the Wi-Fi card and then we've
got an IO Shield as well as all the documentation that you can conveniently
find on the internets which to my
understanding is something to do with tubes or something like that which leads
us to the motherboard itself so I'm going to take you guys on a tour I
actually had someone uh tell me sockets are sockets not that long ago when I was
doing a video and I was saying how Gigabyte has their whole uh 15 micro
goldplated CPU memory PCI Express pin
thing going on and the truth of the matter is that no not all sockets are
manufactured and provided by Intel and there are more expensive and less
expensive of socket implementations that the manufacturers can put on their
motherboard so Gigabyte has gone ahead and called out that they have a better
socket for the CPU as well as for memory
and the PCI Express slots they've also implemented a very high current 8 Pin
plus four pin Design This is only going to be relevant if you're the kind of
person who is even capable of using a board like this to its maximum potential
and speaking of using the board to its maximum potential you have the option to
either use air cooling or liquid cooling so the vrm cooler is using a hybrid
design so you can turn on this fan which Gigabyte claims is silent but I'm going
to go ahead and call them on that one because small fans are never silent or
you can disable it completely or just take it off which is what I would
probably do and use the 38 in integrated
barbs to liquid cool the vrm which would
be very very sweet around the CPU socket
we find the vrm design which is Extreme beefy on this board using all
International Rectifier brand components for the pwm as well as the ic's although
most of that is hidden by the cooling solution here you can also see that
whether it's here around the CPU socket or in other parts of the board is using
all what Gigabyte is calling their durable black solid caps so it's all
kind of part of the overall Ultra durable branding that Gigabyte has which
refers to their 2 O copper PCB their glass fabric PCB design that improves
humidity resistance as well as generally the use of better quality components
which is useful not only from a better performance perspective because if you
guys saw our recent video comparing a high performance ATX board to an ITX
board performance-wise there might not be that much of a difference but there
can be a longevity difference and a stability difference when we're talking
about pushing things to the absolute limit I mean the board must have every
possible onboard button reset power One
Touch overclocking with the turbo button the tag button recalls a favorite
setting that You' set up within the BIOS the ignition button I can't even
remember what that one does ah yes allows you to jump allows you to keep
the power on to the motherboard even once it is turned off so there are a
variety of reasons overclockers might want to do this particularly not wanting
the components to get too cold and have condensation form in an outof control
fashion you've also got base clock up
and down as well as multiplier up and
down and a gear button that changes the ratios of up and down this for the other
functionality and finally the Facebook button which allows you to fire up
Facebook and tell your other social media followers all about your
overclocking exp points no that's not actually what this does that is the
trigger button which allows you to set up your benchmarking run you're ready to
go boom boom boom okay at a nice low stable frequency flip the button boom
you're running at your extreme frequency then once your benchmark run is done
flip it back and now it's stable enough to submit your scores and all that
you've got all of your voltage checkpoints whether it's for VC cor vdm
blah blah blah etc etc etc as well as an onboard post debug led the 24 pin
connectors it's an ideal location along the right hand Edge and the front USB 3
connectors in its almost ideal location on the right hand Edge but not in a
right angle configuration this is cool right here these are PCI Express
switches that allow you to actually turn on and off different PCI Express slots
these can be great for diagnosing issues whether you're on open test bench and
there's the doorbell or whether you are just have something like a complex water
cooling setup on your board and you're trying to figure out what's going wrong
and it's a lot easier to turn off a PCI Express slot than it is to pull a
graphics card also related to the PCI Express slots is this extra auxiliary
SATA connector if you're installing more than two graphics cards plug a SATA
connector in there and it'll give you a little bit extra power for those cards and those slots we've got six SATA 3 6
GB per second ports powered by the Intel controller and then four more powered by
a Marvel controller then finally we've got a SOS clear switch down here on the
bottom right and more fan headers we'll cover those later front panel connectors
for if you are installing this board in an actual case another front USB 3
header two front USB 2 headers a com
Port of all things and front panel audio although there isn't a particularly
high-end audio implementation on this board unlike the more gaming optimized
board from their G1 Series so this is really overclocking optimized not
necessarily gaming optimized now I want to point out where all the fan
connectors are on this board so we've got two up here on the top not a whole
lot down the right hand Edge so there's basically just one here so that's three
total now and boom High concentration on the bottom two more for five one more
for six another two for eight and finally the ninth one is over here at
the back which is great if you have a rear 120 mm fan that you want to install
it on the PCI Express configuration is very very ample so Gigabyte is using a
switching solution in order to achieve 4X or rather 8X 88x 8X 8X bandwidth
required for four-way Crossfire or
four-way SLI configuration so you can
put pretty much whatever graphics cards you could possibly want on this
particular board once we get around to the rear IO we find two usb2 ports two
HDMI ports DisplayPort a PS2 keyboard
mouse combo Port six USB 3.0 ports optical audio out 2 GB Ethernet ports
and 7.1 audio out although most overclockers probably won't even care
about the audio out I think I missed the memory support so of course it supports
dual Channel DDR3 memory up to 8 gig dims at this point in time and pretty
much any speed you could possibly see fit to put in it remember though the
maximum speed achievable particularly on the Haswell platform is going to be
determined by your CPUs integrated memory controller as well as the
frequency you're pushing for on your CPU because the higher that frequency goes
the lower your max memory over clock will be unless you happen to be
particularly talented thank you for checking out this unboxing and overview
of the z87x OC force from Gigabyte I
think I actually missed one very important thing here and that is the
dedicated switch to go between the two bioses on this board so if you do happen
to Brick something or it just sort of the power goes out in the middle of a flash you will be able to recover it
like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if
you were somewhere in between and as always don't forget to subscribe
he