welcome to one of the most Crazy Town motherboard overviews I have ever done
to start with most of these features are things that I can't even validate
without Subzero Cooling and a lot more overclocking skill than I possess and
things I've never had any need for so most of you won't either but the
Gigabyte z97x so force does so many
things differently that I think it merits a pretty indepth video
the cmstorm sf7 uses a massive 18 cm fan
to cool your gaming notebook and it adds a four port USB hub click now to learn
more included in the Box are The Usual Suspects including a manual driver dis
two-way SLI Bridge Crossfire Bridge IO shield and four SATA cables then a
couple of things that are a little bit more unique first up is adapters for the
voltage checkpoints that can be used to measure anything from standard stuff
like CPU core voltage to some obscure stuff that I've never even heard of let
alone felt the need to measure and an OC
brace a metal bracket that supports your expansion cards so they don't flop over
if you're testing on an open platform or just putting it on top of the box Neato
moving on to the board itself it features a catchy orange and black color
scheme with a matte black PCB and silver accents for gigabytes company branding
and Ultra durable branding now in the
past gaming features and overclocking
features were often synonymous and any high-end board would have the full
complement of both but this trend has started to change somewhat with the
release of gaming boards that have no CPU overclocking capabilities at all and
overclocking boards that kind of skimp on the gaming stuff so with this board
it's somewhere in the middle and I'm going to do two separate physical tours
one for the general user and gaming features that make the product usable
for folks who just want to build a normal PC with it and one for the
overclocking features that only the hardcores are really going to care about
so at the center of the board is an LGA 1150 socket with support for Haswell and
Haswell refresh Intel Core Series CPUs with power provided by an 8 plus 4 pin
power setup going through an 8-phase digital vrm solution with custom black
capacitors rated to operate for 10,000 hours at 105 degrees cels that
collectively can handle up to 40 amps of current to the CPU wow moving over we've
got four DDR3 memory slots that run in dual channel will support for up to DDR3
3300 MHz memory listed on this spec sheet and then next up is one of the
most featur Den chunks of motherboard PCB that I have ever seen the onboard
debug display is great for Reading Post codes and diagnosing random issues the
OC turbo button loads a preconfigured overclocking profile for OneTouch basic
optimization the onboard power button is great for folks like me who often use
boards without a case the clear seos button lets you clear bad settings that
you are that are keeping the board from booting and the Dual bio switch May save
your bacon if a BIOS update gets interrupted at some point and you need
to rescue your board without sending it in to be serviced everything else here
is very overclocking oriented so we'll come back to it later the 24 pin power
is in its ideal location which leads us to storage since there's not much else
to say about that we've got the option to use either six standard SATA 36 GB
per second drives or four of those and a
single SATA Express 10 gabit per second
drive SATA Express is a new standard that is backwards compatible with
existing SATA drives but can use PCI
Express over a cable for improved latency and throughput there aren't
really any drives yet but when new 2 and2 in ssds arrive using this connector
they will be able to deliver better sequential performance than previous
models further down we've got a couple of onboard USB ports these are great for
test bench use or even for normal use if you had something like an encryption key
or a USB Bluetooth adapter that you basically wanted to have plugged in all
the time and not have it be in the way in the back of the machine and then to
the left this front USB 3 header isn't really great but I understand why it's
not on the right with all the fancy stuff that's going on over there front
audio is plugged into the standard header on the separate separated PCB
that makes up the bottom left of the board you can tell that Gigabyte has
physically separated the traces because this blank PCB line will be illuminated
when the system is powered on this slightly reduces interference for
cleaner onboard audio and that combined with a pretty hefty amplifier and
realtech alc1150 audio codec should make
the audio Solution on this board actually pretty darn solid especially for an overclocking oriented board next
up we've got PCI Express Lots the board supports four-way Crossfire or two-way
SLI with a single PCI e1x slot that will
get covered even if you just have a single graphics card installed and then
a couple of old school PCI slots rounding out expansion of note here is
the six pin PCI Express female connector
above those slots that you'll want to plug in if you're running more than two
graphics cards to make sure that you don't burn out your 24 pin connector
rear IO is pretty standard fair with four USB 2.0 ports VGA DVI DisplayPort
and HDMI output for the Onboard video optical audio out a PS2 keyboard mouse
combo Port something I do still like to see four usb3 ports a killer e 2200 gbit
land port that does support networking prioritization and then finally that 7.1
audio that I was talking about before
then shifting back to the inside the onboard fan headers are located here
here here here here here here and here
so there are a total of eight of them meaning that even some of the most
ludicrous systems actually won't need to use anything outside of the onboard
headers to power up all the fans which leads us pretty well into one of the
more exotic features of this board here's one for you OC
ignition Powers the motherboard and connected components like fans while the
system is shut down this is great for maintaining air flow to combat
condensation and reduce cold bug issues for extreme over clocking and it's also
great for building demo systems that just need to look nice and look like
they're running but don't actually need to work the OC tag button lets you
configure your favorite customized settings in the BIOS then apply them
with one touch the OC touch buttons let you manually raise and lower the CPU
multiplier at base clock speed and the rate at which they change using hardware
buttons the memory safe button runs relaxed RAM timing settings to help
eliminate memory compatibilities when you're first booting up the boards you can get into the BIOS and make changes
speaking of getting into the BIOS the direct to BIOS button lets you boot
right into the BIOS without pressing delete when you boot up the system the
settings lock button remembers your last successful settings even if you clear
the seos which is kind of cool so you can like you can like override your
settings and then you can override clearing the override and then there's
like another one that actually lets you override that by that's the cat switch
by removing the battery from the board just with a button and doing a full
clear so it's like crazy town the Dual bio switch enables or disables gigabytes
dual bio something I would suggest that you actually leave on and then there's a
bio switch that lets you manually switch between which physical BIOS chip you are
working off this can be great for diagnosing issues and for analyzing
performance between multiple firmware revisions the OC trigger switch lets you
boot up with a safe easy setting then engage it to jump to an aggressive
frequency only during your benchmark run and the PCI Express dip switches let you
turn the PCI E 16x slot on and off for
easy diagnosis of issues when running multiple cards this is a fantastic
feature for water coolers as well as extreme overclockers when it can be kind
of a bear to get a card out and find out which one's causing the system to be
flaky and then they've got another related one also dip switches but this
time for the dim slot so you can switch slots on and off one at a time for
finding out which one runs the best or for figuring out if there's a flaky
stick when you're doing diagnosis without actually physically taking them
out so that's pretty much it other than the
usual Gigabyte you know Ultra durable you know great build quality thick
copper PCB glass fabric humidity resistance stuff thank you for watching
my overview video of the z97x so force
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