 Buy a qualifying Intel product and get entered in the Intel Dynamic Ticket Giveaway for a chance to win great prizes. Visit IntelGamingPromo.com to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing and overview of a product that's probably designed more for people who don't pay for hardware than for people who actually buy their own hardware. So it is expensive and overbuilt to the point where it's hardly even practical unless you're one of those guys who's going for every possible frequency record, whether it's on CPU or memory or whatever else. And it farted. Or whatever else the case may be. This is the Z87X OC Force from Gigabyte, a proud continuation of the OC board traditions of orange slots, black PCBs, beautiful aesthetics, and overbuilt design. So we've got a two-way SLI bridge, a three-way SLI bridge, a four-way SLI bridge, a 16-way SLI bridge. No, I'm just kidding. Actually, this is really cool. So this is what they're calling the OC brace, and it is basically a way to attach PCI brackets to the back of the board when it's on a test bench to support your card so they don't lean over. I mean, that is so cool. It's the kind of thing that no one who actually pays for hardware and puts a motherboard inside a case will ever care about. But like, come on, that's so cool. I love it. Anyway, two-way Crossfire bridge. V checkpoint adapters so you can monitor your voltages. I'll show you those on the motherboard itself. Six SATA cables. Looks like, yeah, three right angles, three straight connectors, antennas for the built-in wireless. So there you go, wireless N as well as Bluetooth. Card, so that's a PCIe 1X card. You could install it in this board. You could buy this board, install it in some other board. Wouldn't matter. It's just a proper PCIe 1X card. Front panel, three and a half inch bay, USB 3.0, doohickey. That's some kind of USB cable for probably something. Ah, yeah, that's right. That's for the Wi-Fi cards. And then we've got an I.O. shield as well as all the documentation that you can conveniently find on the internets, which to my understanding is something to do with tubes or something like that, which leads us to the motherboard itself. So I'm going to take you guys on a tour. I actually had someone tell me sockets are sockets not that long ago when I was doing a video and I was saying how Gigabyte has their whole 15 micro gold-plated CPU memory PCI Express pin thing going on. And the truth of the matter is that no, not all sockets are manufactured and provided by Intel. And there are more expensive and less expensive socket implementations that the manufacturers can put on their motherboard. So Gigabyte has gone ahead and called out that they have a better socket for the CPU as well as for memory and the PCI Express slots. They've also implemented a very high current eight pin plus four pin design. This is only going to be relevant if you're the kind of person who is even capable of using a board like this to its maximum potential. And speaking of using the board to its maximum potential, you have the option to either use air cooling or liquid cooling. So the VRM cooler is using a hybrid design so you can turn on this fan, which Gigabyte claims is silent, but I'm going to go ahead and call them on that one because small fans are never silent. Or you can disable it completely or just take it off. This is what I would probably do and use the three eighths inch integrated barbs to liquid cool the VRM, which would be very, very sweet around the CPU socket. We find the VRM design, which is extremely beefy on this board using all international rectifier brand components for the PWM as well as the ICs. Although most of that is hidden by the cooling solution here. You can also see that whether it's here around the CPU socket or in other parts of the board is using all what Gigabyte is calling their durable black solid caps. So it's all kind of part of the overall ultra durable branding that Gigabyte has, which refers to their two ounce copper PCB, their glass fabric PCB design that improves humidity resistance as well as generally the use of better quality components, which is useful not only from a better performance perspective, because if you guys saw our recent video comparing a high performance ATX board to an ITX board, performance wise, there might not be that much of a difference, but there can be a longevity difference and a stability difference when we're talking about pushing things to the absolute limit. I mean, the board must have every possible on board button reset power, one touch overclocking with the turbo button, the tag button recalls a favorite setting that you've set up within the BIOS, the ignition button, I can't even remember what that one does. Ah, yes, allows you to jump, allows you to keep the power on to the motherboard even once it is turned off. So there are a variety of reasons overclockers might want to do this, particularly not wanting the components to get too cold and have condensation form in an out of control fashion. You've also got base clock up and down as well as multiplier up and down and a gear button that changes the ratios of up and downness for the other functionality. And finally, the Facebook button, which allows you to fire up Facebook and tell your other social media followers all about your overclocking exploits. No, that's not actually what this does. It's the trigger button, which allows you to set up your benchmarking run. You're ready to go. Boom, boom, boom. OK. At a nice low stable frequency, flip the button. Boom, you're running at your extreme frequency. Then once your benchmark run is done, flip it back. And now it's stable enough to submit your scores and all that. You've got all of your voltage checkpoints, whether it's for V-Core, V-Dim, blah, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, as well as an on board post debug LED, the 24 pin connectors. It's an ideal location along the right hand edge and the front USB three connectors. And it's almost ideal location on the right hand edge, but not in a right angle configuration. This is cool right here. These are PCI Express switches that allow you to actually turn on and off different PCI Express slots. These can be great for diagnosing issues, whether you're on an open test bench and there's the doorbell or whether you are just have something like a complex water cooling setup on your board and you're trying to figure out what's going wrong. And it's a lot easier to turn off a PCI Express slot than it is to pull a graphics card. Also related to the PCI Express slots is this extra auxiliary SATA connector. If you're installing more than two graphics cards, plug a SATA connector in there and it'll give you a little bit extra power for those cards in those slots. We've got six SATA three, six gigabit per second ports powered by the Intel controller and then four more powered by a Marvell controller. Then finally, we've got a CMOS clear switch down here on the bottom right and more fan headers. We'll cover those later. Front panel connectors for if you are installing this board in an actual case, another front USB 3 header, two front USB 2 headers, a COM port of all things and front panel audio. Although there isn't a particularly high end audio implementation on this board, unlike the more gaming optimized board from their G1 series. So this is really overclocking optimized, not necessarily gaming optimized. Now I want to point out where all the fan connectors are on this board. So we've got two up here on the top, not a whole lot down the right hand edge. So there's basically just one here. So that's three total now and boom, high concentration on the bottom. Two more for five, one more for six, another two for eight. And finally, the ninth one is over here at the back, which is great if you have a rear 120 millimeter fan that you want to install it on. The PCI Express configuration is very, very ample. So Gigabyte is using a switching solution in order to achieve 4X or rather 8X, 8X, 8X, 8X bandwidth required for four way crossfire or four way SLI configuration. So you can put pretty much whatever graphics cards you could possibly want on this particular board. Once we get around to the rear I.O., we find two USB 2 ports, two HDMI ports, display port, a PS2 keyboard mouse combo port, six USB 3.0 ports, optical audio out, two Gigabyte Ethernet ports, and 7.1 audio out, although most overclockers probably won't even care about the audio out. I think I missed the memory support. So of course it supports dual channel DDR3 memory up to 8 gig DIMMs at this point in time and pretty much any speed you could possibly see fit to put in it. Remember though, the maximum speed achievable, particularly on the Haswell platform, is going to be determined by your CPU's integrated memory controller as well as the frequency you're pushing for on your CPU because the higher that frequency goes, the lower your max memory overclock will be unless you happen to be particularly talented. Thank you for checking out this unboxing and overview of the Z87X OC Force from Gigabyte. I think I actually missed one very important thing here and that is the dedicated switch to go between the two BIOSes on this board. So if you do happen to brick something or it just sort of the power goes out in the middle of a flash, you will be able to recover it. Like the video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment if you were somewhere in between and as always don't forget to subscribe.