The Gigabyte GA-Z170X-SOC Force is no entry-level board by any means. The board was unveiled back in July and has been sitting at the top of the enthusiast “dream machine” list for at least six months now. During CES, we saw this special edition of this Z170, Socket 1151 motherboard specifically engineered and customized for liquid nitrogen (LN2) overclocking.
In review, the GA-170X-SOC Force features a Turbo B-Clock chip that allows users to push the BCLK frequency up to 200MHz (instead of 100, 125 and 167MHz) and four DDR4 DIMM slots with support for up to 64GB of DDR4 3866MHz (O.C.) memory. PCI-Express bandwidth also runs aplenty, as the board features four PCI-E 3.0 x16 slots (x16/x8/x16/x8), three PCI-E 3.0 x1 slots and three PCI-E 3.0 x4 M.2 connectors each running at an impressive 32GB/s each. The M.2 slots also support RAID for an incredible amount of storage bandwidth, should one have the urge to install three NVMe-ready M.2 SSDs in RAID0 configuration at any given time. Additional connectors include eight SATA III 6Gbps ports, three SATA Express (SATA 3.2 16Gbps) ports, one USB 3.1 (Type-A) port, one USB 3.1 (Type-C) port, four USB 3.0 ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, one Intel Gigabit Ethernet port, one HDMI port, one MiniDisplay port, one PS/2 connector, one optical S/PDIF port, 7.1 channel audio and one Gigabyte OC PCI-E switch.
Another feature that particularly stood out to us is the extra bandwidth available to each USB 3.1 (Gen II) port. Traditionally, USB 3.1 generation II ports run at 10Gbps. The Gigabyte Z170X SOC Force takes extra bandwidth from two PCI-E 3.0 lanes and gives it to the two onboard Intel USB 3.1 ports, enabling them to run at a stunning 16Gbps each.
The board also features a high quality 8/16 phase design along with the latest in digital PWM technology. According to Steve B. from TweakTown, the VRM is well tuned, minor rails are all using 40A power stages, and LLC is some of the best he has seen so far.
Gigabyte’s overclocking session on the Z170X-SOC-Force was live streamed during CES and both the live streaming computer and the Z170X-SOC-Force LN2 setup used Gigabyte Xtreme Gaming Geforce GTX 980 Ti graphics cards. These particular GPUs featured special liquid nitrogen-ready BIOS versions with extra 6-pin PCI-E power plugs.
Hicookie laughingly admitted that they were using an AMD mounting system for the liquid nitrogen setup. He was joined by fellow overclocking champion Boris_sdk and the Gigabyte team for an overclocking marathon in Gigabyte’s CES 2016 ballroom that lasted three days. There are fifteen archived Twitch.tv streams from the CES 2016 overclocking sessions and they can be found here.
Steve B. from TweakTown took the time to interview Hicookie after the event. His full interview with the humble 38-year old professional overclocker can be found here.