GIGABYTE Z97X-SOC Force Review
by Ian Cutress on June 17, 2014 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gigabyte
- Overclocking
- Z97
Gaming Benchmarks
F1 2013
First up is F1 2013 by Codemasters. I am a big Formula 1 fan in my spare time, and nothing makes me happier than carving up the field in a Caterham, waving to the Red Bulls as I drive by (because I play on easy and take shortcuts). F1 2013 uses the EGO Engine, and like other Codemasters games ends up being very playable on old hardware quite easily. In order to beef up the benchmark a bit, we devised the following scenario for the benchmark mode: one lap of Spa-Francorchamps in the heavy wet, the benchmark follows Jenson Button in the McLaren who starts on the grid in 22nd place, with the field made up of 11 Williams cars, 5 Marussia and 5 Caterham in that order. This puts emphasis on the CPU to handle the AI in the wet, and allows for a good amount of overtaking during the automated benchmark. We test at 1920x1080 on Ultra graphical settings.
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Bioshock Infinite
Bioshock Infinite was Zero Punctuation’s Game of the Year for 2013, uses the Unreal Engine 3, and is designed to scale with both cores and graphical prowess. We test the benchmark using the Adrenaline benchmark tool and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
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Tomb Raider
The next benchmark in our test is Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider is an AMD optimized game, lauded for its use of TressFX creating dynamic hair to increase the immersion in game. Tomb Raider uses a modified version of the Crystal Engine, and enjoys raw horsepower. We test the benchmark using the Adrenaline benchmark tool and the Xtreme (1920x1080, Maximum) performance setting, noting down the average frame rates and the minimum frame rates.
| Tomb Raider, 1080p Max | ||
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TiGr1982 - Friday, June 20, 2014 - link
This board should have been tested with new Devil's Canyon CPU.What's the point of using year-old 4770K?...
BTW, where is Devil's Canyon review? Sometimes Anandtech is severely lagging in real computing stuff review, hurrying to post a lot about iCrap and other smartphone toys...
haardrr - Sunday, June 22, 2014 - link
june 26 is the date the devils canyon review will appear. my guess based on the date that Newegg starts selling the Devils Canyon 4970 Khaardrr - Sunday, June 22, 2014 - link
um, err, make that a 4790k, not a 4970k...dragonhockey - Sunday, June 22, 2014 - link
If you are looking for a motherboard with an outstanding price, quality components, and a support team you can count on look no further than the motherboards from Gigabyte. It is well-known for years as they produce some of the toughest board and now giving you another state of the art motherboard loaded with new features.Joepublic2 - Monday, June 23, 2014 - link
Why don't you guys pry that heat sink off offer a more nuanced analysis of the board's VRM? There's so little to differentiate motherboards based on the same chipset these days; this is one of the few areas where they still differ significantly. It is good to see they're using screw fasteners on the heatsinks (like my z87 board) which I would expect have much higher mounting force/better heat transfer than the push pins used on some other gigabyte z97 boards.boe - Tuesday, June 24, 2014 - link
I'm hoping the GIGABYTE GA-Z97X-Gaming G1 starts to drop in price soon. Seems like a great design other than Intel's flaw in their lack of PCIe lanes for standard processors.OClock - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Could anyone tell me if this motherboard will work with i5 4690 and four NVIDIA GPUs ?My problem is that in a 4 GPU config, this motherboard runs at 8x 4x 4x 4x. Where as the CPU only supports max 16x express lanes. Now if the GPU is locked to 8x in first PCIe slot, then does that mean the i5 4690 will hit a bottle next after 3 GPUs? Considering that the first PCI slot will not run below 8x. Hence the 16x express lanes won't get divided into 4x 4x 4x 4x. Instead due to this, the motherboard it will run at 8x 4x 4x. I hope I didn't confuse anyone.
This rig I am building is for GPU rendering. And GPU rendering runs fine without SLI. No ATI either.