Here are the first photos and our first look at Gigabyte’s upcoming flagship targeted towards overclockers and enthusiasts, the Z170-SOC Force. Gigabyte keeps the same black and orange design that they have been using on their overclocking motherboards. For those wondering this board keeps the traditional ATX form factor.
This board has a very impressive VRM, a 24-phase VRM to be exact! The aggressive heatsinks that cover the power delivery components are outfitted for liquid cooling. The card gets power from a combination of 24pin ATX, 8pin EPS, 4pin ATX, and 6pin PCI-Express. The CPU socket is wired to four DDR4 DIMM slots that support up to 64 GB of DDR4-3200 memory.
As far as expansion slots go you have four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots (electrical x16/NC/NC/x4 or x8/NC/x8/x4 or x8/x4/x4/x4) as well as three PCI-Express 3.0 x1 slots. Also located in between the PCI-Express slots are three M.2 slots (32 Gb/s). Other storage connectivity includes three SATA-Express ports and eight SATA 6GB/s ports.
At the front corner of the board you will find Gigabyte’s OC Touch controls that allow for manual overclocking of the system. There are also dip-switches to turn off the PCI-Express slots, a debug LED, voltage connection points, and whole plethora of other buttons and switches to fine tune your system.
There are two USB 3.1 ports (two type-A, from which one converts to type-C if it’s populated), 8 USB 3.0 ports (4 at the rear, 4 by headers), and a pretty good number of USB 2.0 ports as well. The board also features Gigabyte’s latest generation AMP-Up audio solution and Gigabit Ethernet. Display outputs include DVI, HDMI, and mini-DisplayPort.
Source: TechPowerUp! | News Archive
