Gigabyte Z97X-SOC FORCE Overclocking Motherboard
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,743 words · ~8 min read
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welcome to one of the most Crazy Town motherboard overviews I have ever done
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to start with most of these features are things that I can't even validate
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without Subzero Cooling and a lot more overclocking skill than I possess and
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things I've never had any need for so most of you won't either but the
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Gigabyte z97x so force does so many
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things differently that I think it merits a pretty indepth video
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the cmstorm sf7 uses a massive 18 cm fan
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to cool your gaming notebook and it adds a four port USB hub click now to learn
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more included in the Box are The Usual Suspects including a manual driver dis
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two-way SLI Bridge Crossfire Bridge IO shield and four SATA cables then a
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couple of things that are a little bit more unique first up is adapters for the
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voltage checkpoints that can be used to measure anything from standard stuff
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like CPU core voltage to some obscure stuff that I've never even heard of let
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alone felt the need to measure and an OC
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brace a metal bracket that supports your expansion cards so they don't flop over
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if you're testing on an open platform or just putting it on top of the box Neato
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moving on to the board itself it features a catchy orange and black color
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scheme with a matte black PCB and silver accents for gigabytes company branding
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and Ultra durable branding now in the
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past gaming features and overclocking
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features were often synonymous and any high-end board would have the full
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complement of both but this trend has started to change somewhat with the
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release of gaming boards that have no CPU overclocking capabilities at all and
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overclocking boards that kind of skimp on the gaming stuff so with this board
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it's somewhere in the middle and I'm going to do two separate physical tours
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one for the general user and gaming features that make the product usable
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for folks who just want to build a normal PC with it and one for the
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overclocking features that only the hardcores are really going to care about
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so at the center of the board is an LGA 1150 socket with support for Haswell and
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Haswell refresh Intel Core Series CPUs with power provided by an 8 plus 4 pin
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power setup going through an 8-phase digital vrm solution with custom black
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capacitors rated to operate for 10,000 hours at 105 degrees cels that
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collectively can handle up to 40 amps of current to the CPU wow moving over we've
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got four DDR3 memory slots that run in dual channel will support for up to DDR3
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3300 MHz memory listed on this spec sheet and then next up is one of the
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most featur Den chunks of motherboard PCB that I have ever seen the onboard
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debug display is great for Reading Post codes and diagnosing random issues the
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OC turbo button loads a preconfigured overclocking profile for OneTouch basic
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optimization the onboard power button is great for folks like me who often use
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boards without a case the clear seos button lets you clear bad settings that
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you are that are keeping the board from booting and the Dual bio switch May save
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your bacon if a BIOS update gets interrupted at some point and you need
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to rescue your board without sending it in to be serviced everything else here
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is very overclocking oriented so we'll come back to it later the 24 pin power
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is in its ideal location which leads us to storage since there's not much else
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to say about that we've got the option to use either six standard SATA 36 GB
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per second drives or four of those and a
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single SATA Express 10 gabit per second
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drive SATA Express is a new standard that is backwards compatible with
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existing SATA drives but can use PCI
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Express over a cable for improved latency and throughput there aren't
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really any drives yet but when new 2 and2 in ssds arrive using this connector
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they will be able to deliver better sequential performance than previous
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models further down we've got a couple of onboard USB ports these are great for
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test bench use or even for normal use if you had something like an encryption key
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or a USB Bluetooth adapter that you basically wanted to have plugged in all
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the time and not have it be in the way in the back of the machine and then to
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the left this front USB 3 header isn't really great but I understand why it's
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not on the right with all the fancy stuff that's going on over there front
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audio is plugged into the standard header on the separate separated PCB
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that makes up the bottom left of the board you can tell that Gigabyte has
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physically separated the traces because this blank PCB line will be illuminated
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when the system is powered on this slightly reduces interference for
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cleaner onboard audio and that combined with a pretty hefty amplifier and
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realtech alc1150 audio codec should make
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the audio Solution on this board actually pretty darn solid especially for an overclocking oriented board next
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up we've got PCI Express Lots the board supports four-way Crossfire or two-way
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SLI with a single PCI e1x slot that will
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get covered even if you just have a single graphics card installed and then
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a couple of old school PCI slots rounding out expansion of note here is
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the six pin PCI Express female connector
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above those slots that you'll want to plug in if you're running more than two
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graphics cards to make sure that you don't burn out your 24 pin connector
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rear IO is pretty standard fair with four USB 2.0 ports VGA DVI DisplayPort
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and HDMI output for the Onboard video optical audio out a PS2 keyboard mouse
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combo Port something I do still like to see four usb3 ports a killer e 2200 gbit
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land port that does support networking prioritization and then finally that 7.1
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audio that I was talking about before
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then shifting back to the inside the onboard fan headers are located here
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here here here here here here and here
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so there are a total of eight of them meaning that even some of the most
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ludicrous systems actually won't need to use anything outside of the onboard
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headers to power up all the fans which leads us pretty well into one of the
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more exotic features of this board here's one for you OC
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ignition Powers the motherboard and connected components like fans while the
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system is shut down this is great for maintaining air flow to combat
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condensation and reduce cold bug issues for extreme over clocking and it's also
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great for building demo systems that just need to look nice and look like
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they're running but don't actually need to work the OC tag button lets you
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configure your favorite customized settings in the BIOS then apply them
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with one touch the OC touch buttons let you manually raise and lower the CPU
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multiplier at base clock speed and the rate at which they change using hardware
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buttons the memory safe button runs relaxed RAM timing settings to help
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eliminate memory compatibilities when you're first booting up the boards you can get into the BIOS and make changes
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speaking of getting into the BIOS the direct to BIOS button lets you boot
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right into the BIOS without pressing delete when you boot up the system the
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settings lock button remembers your last successful settings even if you clear
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the seos which is kind of cool so you can like you can like override your
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settings and then you can override clearing the override and then there's
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like another one that actually lets you override that by that's the cat switch
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by removing the battery from the board just with a button and doing a full
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clear so it's like crazy town the Dual bio switch enables or disables gigabytes
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dual bio something I would suggest that you actually leave on and then there's a
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bio switch that lets you manually switch between which physical BIOS chip you are
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working off this can be great for diagnosing issues and for analyzing
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performance between multiple firmware revisions the OC trigger switch lets you
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boot up with a safe easy setting then engage it to jump to an aggressive
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frequency only during your benchmark run and the PCI Express dip switches let you
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turn the PCI E 16x slot on and off for
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easy diagnosis of issues when running multiple cards this is a fantastic
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feature for water coolers as well as extreme overclockers when it can be kind
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of a bear to get a card out and find out which one's causing the system to be
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flaky and then they've got another related one also dip switches but this
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time for the dim slot so you can switch slots on and off one at a time for
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finding out which one runs the best or for figuring out if there's a flaky
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stick when you're doing diagnosis without actually physically taking them
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out so that's pretty much it other than the
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usual Gigabyte you know Ultra durable you know great build quality thick
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copper PCB glass fabric humidity resistance stuff thank you for watching
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my overview video of the z97x so force
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and just like with all of my videos you can find a link with pricing and availability that includes my affiliate
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code in the video description under the like share and dislike buttons which I'd
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love for you to use accordingly also in the video description is a support link
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hope you enjoyed this video just as much as we enjoyed making it and don't forget to mash with
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