GIGABYTE just unveiled a very special Overclocking board, the Z97X-SOC FORCE LN2, and the board already break the memory frequency word record.
This mainboard is based on the Z97X-SOC FORCE, featuring the overclockers famous features like the OC Panel and the SMD memory slots.
The biggest differences are in the memory slot location and CPU Socket area. In fact GIGABYTE pushed the game of efficiency and Overclocking so far that they kept only two memory slots and moved them as close as possible to the CPU socket.
They are so close that this mainboard doesn’t feature any CPU socket holes for the cooling, this is truly for extreme overclockers.
Why no mounting holes ? Well this is simple : they are in between the ram slots and the cpu socket, and mainboard PCB traces have to go around theses holes to reach the memory slots. For any increase in turns, path and total length on the PCB you also increase the latency (really low but still) and the interferences. And… more interferences mean lower overclocking…
Having the dimm slots so close to the CPU socket allow the Z97X-SOC FORCE LN2 board to be highly optimized for memory Overclocking.
If we summ up, it means there is less interferences on the dimms slots due to SMD (surface mounted device) design – the memory slots don’t have pins going through the PCB to the other side – and the general design between cpu socket and memory slot being extremely close and optimized : this board will definetly be a memory Overclocking record holder !
That was proved to be true: at the time of the launch, during the press conference, HiCookie, Dino and Sofos where overclocking the board on liquid nitrogen and broke the memory frequency world record with an impressive DDR3-2250MHZ (4.5ghz memory).
Dino also told us that there is still room left for improvement on that score !
This will get really interesting with the major memory Overclocking event going on this week.
Stay tuned ! Keep pushing it !
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