Connectors and I/O

In total there are ten angled SATA ports on the Gigabyte X99 SOC Force, which is enough for every gaming rig, overclocking setup or workstation. Two SATA ports can be combined to one SATA-Express connectors offering additional flexibility. All the SATA ports support 6Gbps bandwidth and they've all been natively wired to the PCH. Apart from that, in order to enhance storage flexibility even further there is one M.2 slots located inbetween the second and the third PCIe x16 slot. 
In the top right corner of this board you will also find onboard power- and reset-buttons as well as a debug LED. In fact there are all the different OC buttons, but wether this is the best spot for the OC buttons or not, that's open for discussion. Should you do mememory overclocking and use liquid nitrogen to keep the DIMMs cool, then it will take about 30 minutes until all buttons are completely frozen and they don't respond anymore.
Last but not least we also want to have a quick look at the PCIe connectors. With this motherboard you get four PCIe 16x Gen 3.0 slots and three PCIe x1 slots and therefore you can even run quad GPU setups.



Totally you'll find five fan headers on the Gigabyte X99 SOC Force which is enough to provide an overclocking rig or a high-end gaming machine with fresh air. Once more practical is the fact, that those are all 4-pin connectors, which allow for fan speed control from within BIOS or Windows.



Looking at the external connectors at the back-panel Gigabyte equipped the X99 SOC Force with eight USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports and one Gigabit ethernet port. Furthermore there is an analogue audio panel as well as a digital audio, a Gigabyte CPU overclocking button, a BIOS switch button and a clear CMOS button.
Having a closer look at the onboard audio reveals an EMI shielded Realtek ALC-1150 chip, which has also been cut off from the rest of the motherboard. Apart from that there ELNA capacitors which should enrich the sound.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 15 - UC Bench
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 16 - Super Pi 1M / 32M
Page 3 - Features	Page 17 - wPrime 1024M Multi Core
Page 4 - Layout	Page 18 - Cinebench
Page 5 - Connectors and I/O	Page 19 - Tomb Raider
Page 6 - BIOS	Page 20 - Metro Last Light
Page 7 - Test setup	Page 21 - Thief
Page 8 - Preview / Gallery	Page 22 - Right Mark Audio Analyzer
Page 9 - 3DMark	Page 23 - BCLK Overclocking
Page 10 - 3DMark 11	Page 24 - Power Consumption
Page 11 - 3DMark Vantage	Page 25 - Performance Rating
Page 12 - PC Mark 8	Page 26 - Price Comparison
Page 13 - SiSoft Sandra 1	Page 27 - Conclusion
Page 14 - SiSoft Sandra 2