Gigabyte Z87X-OC Force review: extreme overclocking board even more extreme?

Some people don't know this but Gigabyte released two orange Z87 OC motherboards in this last round.  The first was a trimmed down version designed for CPU and Memory overclocking while the other is a fully featured motherboard with an onboard PLX chip for proper 4-way GPU support.

Which one is better?  Well, it would depend on who you ask.

The main difference is that the Z87X-OC Force is equipped with a PLX PEX8747 chip that can double the 16 PCI-Express 3.0 lanes from the CPU. Because of that, the four orange PCI-Express slots can be configured 16/0/16/0, 16/0/8/8 and 8/8/8/8 which supports 4-way SLI and 4-way Crossfire. The black PCI-Express x16 slot is directly connected to the CPU, so if you have one video card you want to overclock you have 0 extra latency. It's a clever solution we've seen before with MSI and ASRock.

There are actually quite a few differences between the boards and I really need to get off my duff and write an article about them. 

Related Web URL: http://us.hardware.info/reviews/4863/gigabyte-z87x...