Another board for Skylake-S
As we've already seen, Gigabyte is prepared for Intel's Skylake launch (presumably in just a couple of weeks) with a handful of motherboards already. In addition to the ones already shown, you can add the Z170X SOC Force to the growing list.
WCCFTech discovered a bunch of pictures of the board over at Thai-language website itfree4U. High end features abound in what appears to be a well thought out design on a board that's clearly aimed at overclockers, though you'll need a big case to run this bad boy -- it's an Extended ATX (E-ATX) form factor motherboard.
As with all Z170X chipset boards for Skylake-S processors, Gigabyte's newest entry sports a new LGA 1151 socket designed for the next generation CPU family. Skylake will support both DDR3 and DDR4 memory, though enthusiast boards like the Z170X SOC Force will run with the latter -- four DIMM slots in this instance, all located on one side of the CPU socket.
Looking around the socket reveals a 20 digital phase power design (16+4 CPU/PLL/memory). There are high end components throughout, including a Turbo BCLK chip for a bigger range of BCLK frequency turning (90-200MHz).
You can also see a familiar touch panel that's a holdover from previous SOC motherboards, along with a diagnostic LED, voltage check points, four PCI Express x16 slots, three PCi Express 3.0 x1 slots, eight SATA 6Gbps ports, three SATA Express ports, two USB 3.0 headers, two USB 2.0 headers, two USB 2.0 internal ports, and an I/O panel with four USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, OC button, PS/2 port, DVI/DisplayPort, HDMI, USB 3.0 Type-C, eSATA, GbE LAN, and audio ports.
All the overclocking goodies in the world won't do a lick of good if the architecture isn't flexible, though some early results are encouraging. Just a few days ago, an overclocker posted a CPU-Z image showing a Core i7-6700K running at nearly 5.2GHz at 1.35V using air cooling.
If final Skylake silicon overclocks anywhere near as well, it will be a lot of fun tinkering on motherboards like Gigabyte's Z170X SOC Force.
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