"Hicookie's 4,274MHz DDR4 Validation on the Z170X-SOC-Force"
even more convenience to this
board. Negating the need to
reach around the back of the
motherboard is a great boon
and one of the many things
that facilitate overclocking
with the SOC-FORCE.
An odd but highly
appreciated feature, perhaps
not in the context of LN2
overclocking is the triple
PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 connectors.
It is rare to find any high
end board offering this
much connectivity for M.2
drives. For those who are not
concerned with overclocking
as such, they would do well
to consider this motherboard
is purely because of this
singular feature. Not only are
you able to make use of all
three connectors in tandem,
you may of course RAID
them for incredible storage
performance. Those that work
with video editing and need the
28 The OverClocker Issue 37 | 2016
insanely fast storage solutions
for 4K work flows would do
well to consider the SOCFORCE as one of the very few
motherboards that offer this
feature.
One has to get to the touted
4-way graphics support.
Depending on your intended
use for this board, this could
either be great or just a tick
box feature that will not be
used but lower single GPU
performance. As you know,
this motherboard uses the
same PLX bridge chip which
means that single GPU
performance is always lower
than it would be on any other
board without the bridge IC.
What that translates into is
that the very thing that this
motherboard was designed
to do, it doesn’t do well at all
if you’re using a single GPU
solution. For 4-way SLI you’re
going to need the X99 platform
and as such, the 4-way
graphics capability while
appreciated, in practice goes
against the very nature of a
motherboard such as this one.
Appropriate on the G1.Gaming,
but perhaps not as