GIGABYTE GA-Z87X-OC Force (rev. 1.0) Pro Reviews

The GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force has the features that could make it a great gaming motherboard in addition to being a great overclocking board! If you're looking for either, the Z87X-OC Force Intel Z87 motherboard may be the right choice for you!

Before continuing with our final thoughts on this board, we would like to take this opportunity to give our friends at GIGABYTE a hearty “Thank You” for giving us the opportunity and pleasure of reviewing the Z87X-OC Force motherboard. GIGABYTE took their award-winning Z77X-UP7 design and improved upon it. The board keeps the orange and black theme from the last generation flagship line, but adds a fully integrated heat pipe cooling all hot areas on the board. The heat pipe includes integrated fans as well as 3/8 inch integrated water barbs for the water cooling enthusiasts. Due to its E-ATX form factor, the Z87X-OC Force has more than enough room for all its add-on features without sacrificing on space in the critical areas around the CPU or PCI-Express slots. The board's performance is top-notch with no stability issues encountered at all in testing. The CMOS battery placement is interesting directly below the chipset heat sink and should remain accessible unless running in dual or more card mode with full length video cards. The board did have a few issues to take note of, the most obvious being the mouse related performance issues encountered in the BIOS. At times, the mouse acceleration in the BIOS appeared to be disabled, making mouse use difficult at best. However, rebooting the system and reentry into the BIOS normally correctly the issue. The other issue was more of a design oddity. For a high-end board designed for both LN2 and water cooling enthusiasts, it was an odd choice to go with integrated barbs on the VRMs sinks. Users are locked in to using 3/8 inch inner diameter tubing with the integrated barbs, small for most enthusiast custom water-based builds. A more flexible solution would have been to allow the user to choose their barb size by integrating G1/4 ports instead of fixed barbs.