8 Phase Power Design |
Since quite some time Gigabyte has been
equipping its boards with
digital power designs. With the Z97X-SOC Force they are very proud about
their solution which is using components from
International Rectifyer (IR3553 and IR3563B) and each phase offers up to 60A.
Additionally Gigabyte makes use of special black capacitors which are
rated a 10'000 hours at 105°C. |
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OC Ignition |
If you activate OC
Ignition basically everything on the system turns on but the CPU. In
this case for example iRAM is able to preserve memory states and also
all fan are running. It can also be a practical features if you want to
fill up a new custom watercooling solution. |
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OC Touch |
OC-Touch
enables overclockers to quickly and easily get more performance from their system. With onboard OC-Touch
buttons, users are able to manually raise and lower the CPU ratio, change BCLK settings, and even change
the
BCLK stepping. These changes can be made at any time whether in the BIOS or
Windows or in real-time without the need for rebooting, so users can quickly fine-tune to find their
CPU’s maximum frequency. In the same area of the board you find voltage measurement
points and connectors. Included in the delivery are twelve voltage
measurement cables to easily connect a voltage read-out device. |
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OC Brace
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Included
in the delivery you find the so called OC Brace. In our opinion this is
one of the most practical new features in a long time. If you attach the
OC Brace to the motherboard, you can then safely install graphics cards
using screws to attach them to the OC Brace. |
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SATA Express Connector
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SATA Express is a new
port for storage devices that basically combines two SATA connectors and
bundles them. Each SATA Express port has been wired using two PCI
Express Gen2 lanes offering a total of 10 Gbps bandwidth. Compared to
SATA-III with 6 Gbps bandwidth this is quite an improvement. |
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Killer E2201
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Gigabyte equips their
gaming motherboards with an E2201 Killer NIC. This chip is capable of
providing features like traffic shaping on application level, which can
help realizing a smoother online gaming experience. |
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