14 DAY TRIAL // Gaming motherboards border on overkill when it comes to, well, everything about them, but they still need to toe the line instead of falling off the slippery slope, because beyond it lie the supremely expensive waters of overclocking test benches.
The iGame Z97 Ymir-X is the latest motherboard from Colorful to successfully toe that line. The company made it in collaboration with Chaintech.
The mainboard uses the standard ATX form factor, even though it does seem to be a little longer than that. Anyway, the Ymir-X, nicknamed “Flame Warrior” in some markets, will definitely make an impression when it's released in Europe and Asia-Pacific.
We don't know for sure when sales will start, since none of the reports about the product had that information. Probably this August though, since most PCs and related products seem to be headed there this week.
The iGame Z97 Ymir-X has eight SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, an mSATA 6.0 Gbps connector (which can behave as a mini PCI Express slot), and three PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots (electrical x8/x4/x4 when all three are populated, x8/x8 for two, x16 for single graphics cards).
Four PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots are available as well, for add-in network cards (unnecessary though they are), wireless adapters, I/O expansion cards, etc.
Of course, you probably won't ever be buying an add-in network card because the mainboard itself has integrated Killer E2200 Gigabit Ethernet already.
On that note, the newcomer also benefits from six USB 3.0 ports (four on the back panel), the Voice Gamer HD audio technology (audio-grade capacitors, a headphones amp, and ground-layer isolation that prevents electrical noise with headsets plugged in), and several video ports (dual-link DVI, D-Sub, HDMI, and DisplayPort).
And just because this isn't an overblown OC test bench it doesn't mean that overclocking isn't supported. The Z97 chipset does have what it takes for it after all. The Flame Warrior has PCIe slot power gating, on-board base-clock tweaking switches, auto-OC buttons and, of course, a rich BIOS to control everything else.
Finally, the Colorful iGame Z97 Ymir-X motherboard has a dense-weave fiber PCB (resilient to humidity), receives power from 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS power connectors, a 16-phase CPU VRM (with driver-MOSFETs), and Poscap capacitors. Finally, as an afterthought the designers included some USB 2.0/1.1 ports. Unfortunately, the price of the newcomer is as much of a mystery as the estimated time of arrival.
