Some say that overclocking is a niche market dominated by hardware enthusiasts and gamers who finally moved out of their parent's basement. Truth is overclocking is a rather large market perpetuated by mainstream hardware sales. A good example of this is any gaming centric graphics card that has been factory overclocked. It may seem outlandish but, to get more performance the manufacturer will adjust the clock speed and sell it at a price premium. Despite the higher cost these cards sell quite well and yet the same consumers cannot grasp the concept of overclocking or why having an overclocking motherboard is beneficial.

In this review we will be looking at a new motherboard from Gigabyte called the X99 SOC Force. The SOC stands for Super OverClock and is designed for hardware enthusiasts who like to tweak and tune their systems for the best performance. At Computex this year we were introduced to the new OC and Gaming motherboards and were told that many of the products shifted such that the OC boards gained some luxury features while the G1 Gaming products gained options to make them friendlier to gamers and system builders.