Gigabyte Z97X-SOC (LGA 1150) Sub-Zero Overclocking Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

Pricing wise, we can find the board for sale in the US at Amazon for $180.60 and the UK at Overclockers UK for £134.99 which is honestly an amazing price based on what you get for your money. The features are in abundance and for anyone wanting to dabble in extreme overclocking, you’ll be pressed to find a similar board for the money. Obviously when this board launched, it was considerably more expensive, but now that it’s been in the market for some time and has been adopted by many professional overclockers across the world, this has helped to drive the price to more reasonable levels.

Overview

First off I want to say that I was really impressed with this board. It is packed with features and comes in at a great price, and if you are looking at trying extreme overclocking out then this would definitely be the board to get. If you are wanting to start playing around with overclocking on air I would strongly suggest at least a decent AIO watercooling loop like a Thermaltake Water 3.0 Extreme S. If you have a 4790K available, then you can try jumping into the fray at 4.5GHz by just setting the multi to 45 and setting the CPU core voltage to 1.27v to test it out ( you may be able to run down to 1.22v but this is CPU specific). Remember that overclocking is very subjective and YMMV – Your Mileage May Vary – since nobody has the exact same hardware or physical settings and even boards and CPUs can have slight deviance from each other and this is relevant even between the same model of hardware and performance of those parts can vary wildly, and this is why you see extreme overclockers binning parts at events looking for those golden chips that will allow them to eek every last drop of performance and clock speed from.

Talking to other overclockers about the board I was told that they really liked the pricing and the DIMM enable/disable dipswitches. Another overclocker stated that he liked the front USB, but his favorite feature was the OC Ignition feature which allows him to take a break while the system warms back up. It allows for a bit of freedom to not have to constantly monitor the system when you want to bring it back to temp again before drawing it down to sub-zero temps for another round.

Overall the performance is there, it is extremely easy to use, beginner friendly, expert optimized, and affordable. If you want something that you can have fun with on a budget then you really need to consider this motherboard as it is really hard to beat and you can’t really ask for much more than that these days. Sure this board isn’t as beefy as the Force variant but as you can see there is little doubt that you can’t push this thing HARD. Of course for those who do want more power and more performance, the SOC-Force is available and pretty soon we will be looking at another overclocking board from Gigabyte with their X99 SOC board, so stay tuned if you want to see how far things can be pushed on Intel’s extreme parts.