Gigabyte Z97X SOC Force Motherboard Review
Power and Software
Finally, having the ability to have so many tools at your disposal is pointless if the quality of the power delivery isn’t clean and consistent, and the Z97X SOC certainly has all of the high end CAPs and MOSFETs you could hope to find thanks to the PowIRstage and black 10K CAPs.
Other features are the customisable UEFI BIOS we first saw on the 8 series motherboards and a ton of additional software to allow you as much control from the desktop as you have in the BIOS. They’ve even brought back the start menu to Windows 8.1.
The BIOS itself is fine enough. We have to say we’re not particularly keen on either of the versions. One seems to be function at the expense of form, and the other form at the expense of function. A middle version that looks nice but is easy to navigate and has all the tweaks at your fingertips would be nice. Of course updating the BIOS is easy, so it’s not a major knock at all as long as the underlying motherboard is the business.
