It may be the most hardcore mainboard exhibited at Computex 2014

Jun 13, 2014 15:06 GMT  ·  By

Computex 2014 may be over and done with, but some products previewed there are only now getting released and/or detailed. The Gigabyte Z97X-SOC FORCE LN2 motherboard is an example.

As the name suggests, the mainboard is intended for the overclocking test benches of people who know how to administer liquid nitrogen (LN2) to their processors.

It has only two memory DIMMs, located close to the CPU so that they may benefit from the LN2 cooling if needed, like during memory OC benchmarks. Also, there are no mounting holes for fans.

Clearly, Gigabyte didn't want there to be any chance for a misunderstanding here: this is a specialized piece of hardware for anyone who wants to overclock the stuffing out of an Intel Haswell or future Broadwell CPU. Or for people who want to use one such CPU and the 9 Series chipset to test the limits of DDR3 memory.

GIGABYTE OC specialists HiCookie, Sofos1990 and Dino22 have already done the latter, pushing Kingston HyperX Predator memory from 2,933 MHz to 4.5 GHz. Gigabyte later scored 4.56 GHz, breaking their record.

Alas, Gigabyte didn't bother saying what price the Z97X-SOC FORCE LN2 bears. Maybe it's betting on the high odds of enthusiast overclockers being the sort of people who don't have financial constraints to worry about.