We already saw Gigabyte’s X99 Gaming G1 WiFi motherboard, and now the company is showing off its X99-SOC Force. Being an SOC motherboard, this thing is built for heavy overclocking.
There are eight total DDR4 memory slots for quad-channel memory configurations, with four positioned on either side of the LGA2011-3 socket. PCI-Express expansion is covered by four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots and three PCI-Express 1x slots, and there are six SATA3 (6Gb/s) ports along with two SATA-Express interfaces, which if unused present you with another four SATA3 (6Gb/s) ports.
As far as our eyes can tell there is a single USB 3.0 header on board, so we’re guessing that there will be eight ports on the rear I/O. Between two of the PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots there's a single M.2 interface, which is rated at 20 Gb/s – twice what you'll find on most boards. Gigabyte likely accomplished this by using four PCI-Express Gen 2.0 lanes. Also present is Gigabyte’s AMP-Up technology, which is essentially dedicated audio hardware.
With regard to overclocking, we can see a number of onboard switches next to the right DDR4 memory slots. There is no indication and we can't be sure, but given that this is an SOC-series motherboard, we expect it to also have LN2 support.
Hopefully we’ll know more around mid-September, when we expect the X99 motherboards, as well as Haswell-E processors to debut. Stay tuned for more.
Follow Niels Broekhuijsen @NBroekhuijsen. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.
