Board Layout and Pictures

If you have seen any of Gigabytes previous overclock motherboards you should know what to expect with the X99 SOC Champion. Alongside of all of the overclock specific features, Gigabyte highlights their overclocks boards with their orange and black theme. MSI does something similar with their yellow M-Power boards. Asus is a little harder to figure out because their overclocking and gaming boards all fall under the ROG brand with its red and black theme. This makes picking the board that works for you a little easier because if you plan on overclocking you go orange and for Gigabyte you go with the G1 line for gaming.

The X99 SOC Champion is one of a few different overclock boards for Intel’s X99 chipset, this board stands out though because they have refined the overclocking features now that they have had more time with the chipset. The Champion when compared to the Force also drops a few features. You loose some of the OC buttons, fewer RAM slots, and a few less connection options both on the board and on the rear I/O.

image 15

image 16

Being an overclocking board Gigabyte went all out on the cooling for the SOC Champion. They didn’t use any fans or water cooling options opting to keep things simple with passive cooling. To do that they did use an impressive four large heatsinks that are all combined with heatpipes to spread the heat all around. For the chipset cooler the large low profile heatsink is considerably larger than what you see on most other boards, taking up all of the space from the ram to front panel connections. I love how the heatpipes for the heatsinks on both the left and right of the ram slots are carefully wrapped around out of the way.

image 17

image 18

image 19

image 20

image 21

image 22

Starting up in the top left corner we have two DDR4 DIMMs with a large heatsink packed between the DIMMs and the back of the rear I/O. Just above that heatsink we have a 4-pin CPU power along with a second CPU power 8-pin above the heatsink just above the CPU. The heatsink is notched to fit just around the 8-pin. There is a 6-pin PCI power plug just above the top PCIe x16 slot, this plug helps feed additional power for when you are running quad-SLI and Crossfire configurations. For fan connections we have a four pin near the 6-pin and a another 4-pin PWM fan header up at the top next to the 4-pin CPU power.

image 24

Over on the top right side we have two more DDR4 DIMMs giving us a total of four, half of what most standard X99 boards have but in line with an overclocked focused board would have (like the Classified that I previously reviewed). Over on this side we have another power connection, the 24-pin motherboard power connection. Just above that we have most of the overclocking specific features of the SOC Champion. Unlike the SOC Force we just have a single large power button where the Force had reset and buttons to adjust your Bclk speed. Anyhow we still have a few other things going on here. For starters we have the CPU fan header (4-pin) and a system fan header. We have onboard voltage measuring points along the edge. Then we have three switches, one is the OC DualBIOS Switch, the next is the OC Trigger, then the last is the Single BIOS Mode Switch.

image 25

image 26

Moving down the right side of the board, next we have the CPU Mode switch that switched from default to Overclocking mode. Just below that we have all of our SATA connections. We get a total of six standard SATA 3 ports along with two SATA Express connectors that consist of two normal SATA plugs and a small half connection that adds up to a faster 10 Gb/s interface. Down along the bottom edge we have our fifth and final 4-pin fan header. Also down along the bottom are two USB 2.0 headers and a USB 3.0 header as well. Then of course we have the front panel connections. I love that Gigabyte makes hooking up the front panel connections simple with color coding inside of the plug itself but they also include labels printed on the PCB just below.  

image 27

image 2

On over to the bottom left edge we have the front panel audio plug all the way over on the left corner. Beyond that you have a THB_C plug and a plug for Gigabyte’s Overclock Panel.

image 3

As I have mentioned before the X99 SOC Champion has full support for Quad SLI/Crossfire. Gigabyte was careful to space each out to get a full two slots for each to make room for their coolers. If you run watercooling or don’t end up running four cards you do have a few other options. In between each x16 slot you do get a single PCIe x1 slot. The CPU lane breakdown for the PCIe x16 slots is the following. If you are running two cards you will get x16 for both cards, when running 3 or 4 cards the 3rd and 4th slots share bandwidth with the 2nd and 1st slots respectively. That means a quad card setup will get x8 to each card, but if you run tri SLI you could get x8 to two and x16 to one. Also keep in mind if you are running the i7-5820K you get fewer CPU slots so the forth slot drops down to x4.

image 4

Right in the middle of the PCIe slots they did also slip in an M.2 connector. You have mounting options for three different lengths and Gigabyte made it simpler by labeling each mount. They are calling this a Turbo M.2 slot although an easier way to look at it is a x4 M.2 meaning it has four CPU lanes. This means full support for the new SSDs with up to 20 Gb/s bandwidth. 

image 5

Also tucked in over next to the PCIe slots is the SOC Champion’s audio card. Gigabyte uses a Realtek ALC1150 audio card with a small metal shield over it with the AMP-UP Audio logo on top of it to prevent interference. The entire audio section is also on its own split PCB and to show that they use a backlit strip to show the gap between the audio PCB and the rest of the motherboard. They also keep the left and right channels split up on different PCB layers to help prevent crosstalk. The ALC1150 provides ten DAC channels that give you a 7.1 through the rear audio panel as well as 2 channels for the front panel connection. You also get a built in rear audio amp, oddly enough I’m not seeing a front headphone amp, something a lot of the most recent boards seem to come with.

image 6

Much like the EVGA X99 board that I tested at launch. The X99 SOC Champion doesn’t have to much on its rear I/O panel. With an overclocking focus we get just enough to get the job done. So over on the left we have two PS2 ports, one for a mouse and a second for a keyboard. I know that a lot of people want PS/2 ports for their old Model M keyboards, but I can’t for the life of me understand the need for a mouse PS/2 port, almost no one is using them. That said it is very possible that the PS/2 mice are less likely to be an issue in extreme overclocking. Beyond that you get four USB 2.0 ports and four USB 3.0 ports. There is also a single Gigabyte Ethernet port and then a 5 port audio panel with an optical connection as well. The EVGA board did have an easy access Clear CMOS button and I wouldn’t have minded getting that on this board as well, but overall you get enough to use this as a main PC if you would like but not the crazy number of USB ports that you see on some of the other boards.

image 23

When we take a look at the back of the X99 SOC Champion we see a few things going on. For starters we have the standard X99 CPU backplate for the two spring holddown. This board also has a second backplate on the back though, the second one is for the heatsink just above the CPU socket. Beyond that here on the bottom we can see the separated audio PCB better and we can also see that Gigabyte went with a slick flat black PCB color.

image 7

 

Log in to comment

garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #36624 22 Apr 2015 18:36
Today I check out a motherboard that is sporting a sharp LanOC Orange color scheme. Check out how it performs inside!
summer01 replied the topic: #36656 16 May 2015 08:42
The world’s number one overclocker, British-born 8Pack selected the Gigabyte X99 SOC Champion is still well equipped due to the nature of the X99 platform?

We have 1763 guests and no members online

supportus