Gigabyte publishes photo album of Z-blur-7 chipset motherboards

by Mark Tyson on 22 April 2014, 20:38

Tags: Gigabyte (TPE:2376), MSI, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

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This afternoon Gigabyte published an album of pictures entitled 'New Intel Chipset Motherboards' via Facebook. While it didn't disclose the chipsets these boards are equipped with, blurring out the important letter/numeral from the names, the Gigabyte Photoshop jockey forgot to blur the Web2.0 style reflection which clearly shows the number nine upside down and inverted…

Looking though the pictures we can clearly see the following motherboards – let's just assume the blurred out number is a '9' to simplify things:

Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H-BK

The UD stands for Ultra Durable and BK marks this motherboard out as a 'Black Edition'. This is undoubtedly an overclocking friendly motherboard meant to be put to work alongside a new Intel processor such as the unlocked Devil's Canyon. You can also clearly see that this motherboard is SLI and CrossFire capable.

Gigabyte Z97X-SOC Force

This is again an overclocking motherboard, made even clearer by the box. The features on the board look pretty similar to what are offered on the Black Edition above. However the orange highlights on this model clearly show it has an extra PCI-Express 3.0 slot suitable for graphics cards. The SOC denotes a 'Super Over Clock' motherboard.

Gigabyte Z97X-UD7 TH

This motherboard's main distinguishing factor is denoted by its TH name suffix which stands for Thunderbolt 2. You can clearly see the ports and connections on this board as Gigabyte has been kind enough to provide a close-up of this board on its own (below). If Thunderbolt 2 connectivity is something you wish to utilise then this might be a board to keep your eye on.

MSI – reminds us of its leaked motherboard images

Just before Easter weekend we saw a whole range of MSI made Intel 9-Series chipset equipped Gaming Series motherboards and their packaging, courtesy of a leak via WCCF-Tech. These sported many trademark MSI features such as Audio Boost 2, Killer LAN, USB Audio Power and so on alongside the support for the newest Haswell refresh processors and M.2 PCI-e storage. Now MSI has followed Gigabytes lead and actually published a picture of an upcoming motherboard and packaging on its Facebook page.



HEXUS Forums :: 7 Comments

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I hope the ITX don't lag too far behind. Time for Biscuit to finally downsize!
At first glance I really didn't like the Orange and Black mobo, then I saw the Yellow and Black and started to appreciate the Orange and Black. I wouldn't like the Yellow at all, but the Orange has something that's kind of growing on me.
The black and orange + black and yellow colour schemes reminds me of the DFI Lanparty motherboards.. Shame they went out of the market.
Ulti
The black and orange + black and yellow colour schemes reminds me of the DFI Lanparty motherboards.. Shame they went out of the market.
I'm not complaining. My current motherboard is one of their last ones, and while it may be extremely overclocker friendly (I've not exactly pushed it), it lacks much of what you'd take for granted in a more rounded board of the past 8 or 9 years. Such basics as an F12 or escape key to choose a device to boot from on startup, and none of the USB boot options in the BIOS actually work with bootable USB sticks. Of all the computers I've worked with from the last half a dozen years, I think this is the only one where I've had to use a DVD to install Windows.

If you've restarted the computer, the computer wouldn't shut down when you asked it too - it would reboot again, then freeze on the first POST screen. There were random reboots, which I've since narrowed down to the motherboard. Both of these issues have cleared in the past 6 months though.

To be honest, I wish I'd returned it. It was barely fit for purpose.
i got the z87 from asrock but thinking about the asus for delided mount i guess ill have to try delided mount on this one first -have the bolts from a liqtech 240 - no other request from this z87m -will upgrade on 14nm release.