Gigabyte X99-SOC Force Motherboard Detailed

[btarunr]

Ahead of its late-August launch, a picture of Gigabyte's flagship socket LGA2011-3 motherboard targeted at overclockers, the X99-SOC Force, leaked to the web. It reveals a monstrosity. In addition to overclocker-friendly VRM brawn, the board introduces a few segment-first features. To begin with, it's built in the ATX form-factor, and draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX, 8-pin EPS, and SATA power connectors. It uses an 8+2+2 phase VRM to power the CPU and memory. The CPU socket is wired to eight DDR4 DIMM slots, and four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots.

Overclocker features include onboard clock and voltage tuning buttons, voltage measurement points, redundant UEFI Dual-BIOS, and more. Storage connectivity includes a 20 Gb/s (PCI-Express 2.0 x4 physical layer) M.2 slot, a SATA-Express 10 Gb/s port, and ten SATA 6 Gb/s ports. Other features include Gigabyte's AmpUP audio solution that features audiophile-grade capacitors, ground-layer isolation, and user-replaceable OPAMP chips, Intel-made gigabit Ethernet, and a number of USB 3.0 ports.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[MxPhenom 216]

That is one gorgeous board.

 

[basco]

looks really good but i hope they make one good bios and not like on z97 3 mixed half baked ones

 

[Aquinus]

That is one gorgeous board.

Hardware wise, I would agree. I'm not sure how I feel with the orange connectors and such. I feel that orange is a harder color to theme your computer around, not just for pairing colors, but for finding other hardware that's colored the same way. I liked the blue and white on my P9X79 Deluxe because I feel there is more hardware you can match with white and blue than orange and black.

I was thinking about complaining about the 8+2+2 VRMs, but I guess Haswell-E chips shouldn't consume as much power as SB-E so something like the 16+2+2 on mine would probably be overkill.

Finally, 1 ethernet port?! Are they insane?!

 

[Octavean]

I like this board,.....

I like it more then the ASRock X99X Killer motherboard in the above article.
I'm not sure I would buy this particular Gigabyte motherboard but it is one I would give serious consideration to.

Personally I don't really care about the color scheme of a motherboard because it just doesn't seem relevant to anything IMO. It doesn't effect performance so meh! Even if I don't care for the color it doesn't really matter to me. The carpet doesn't have to match the drapes,.....

 

[Yellow&Nerdy?]

Dunno why a motherboard specifically designed for overclocking has 6 SATA + 2 SATA Express ports. Looks damn sexy though. Here's to hope they bring the black + green boards back too.