 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 sub-zero 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 SoC Force does so many things differently that I think it merits a pretty in-depth video. The CM Storm SF17 uses a massive 18cm fan to cool your gaming notebook and it adds a 4-port USB hub. Click now to learn more. Included in the box are the usual suspects including a manual driver disc, two-way SLI bridge, crossfire bridge, I.O. 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, 4GB 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 hard cores 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 Celsius. They 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 with support for up to DDR3 3300 megahertz memory listed on the spec sheet. And then next up is one of the most feature-dense 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 pre-configured overclocking profile for one-touch basic optimization. The onboard power button is great for folks like me who often use boards without a case. The clear CMOS button lets you clear bad settings that are keeping the board from booting. And the dual BIOS 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 3 6 gigabit per second drives or four of those and a single SATA Express 10 gigabit 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 2.5-inch 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 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 Realtek 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 slots. The board supports 4-way Crossfire or 2-way SLI with a single PCIe 1X 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 6-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 I.O. is pretty standard fare with 4 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, 4 USB 3 ports, a Killer E 2200 gigabit LAN 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, 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 airflow to combat condensation and reduce cold bug issues for extreme overclocking, 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, 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 and 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 CMOS, which is kind of cool, so you can override your settings, and then you can override clearing the override, and then there's another one that actually lets you override that by, that's the CBAT 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 BIOS switch enables or disables gigabytes dual BIOS, something I would suggest that you actually leave on, and then there's a BIOS 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 PCIe 16x slots 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 DIMM 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. Whoa! 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 SoC Force. And just like with all of my videos, you can find a link with pricing and availability that includes my affiliate code in the video description under the like, share, and dislike buttons, which I'd love for you to use accordingly. Also in the video description is a support link where you can give us a monthly contribution, buy a t-shirt or change your Amazon bookmarks to ones that include our affiliate code, so we get a small kickback whenever you buy underwear or whatever it is you buy on Amazon. Thank you for watching, guys. I hope you enjoyed this video just as much as we enjoyed making it. And don't forget to mash with certainty that subscribe button if you haven't already.