There was a time when each manufacturer had its own color theme to distinguish its overclocking motherboards from its more general-purpose boards. MSI’s MPower and XPower series were yellow, ASUS’ Maximus series was red, while Gigabyte’s Force series was orange. For some time now, we’ve been seeing a resurgence of these old overclocking series, but in more affordable models. For example, MSI announced new Intel and AMD MPowers. Now it’s Gigabyte’s turn to unveil its new B850M Force, a tribute to the Z97 and Z170 series.
B850M Force: Gigabyte also resurrects its old overclocking motherboard series!
With this board, the brand offers us a motherboard featuring a visual theme based on the colors white, black and orange. A tribute to the manufacturer’s old Force boards. As you can see, this board is geared towards memory overclocking. In fact, it features a dual DIMM configuration in DDR5. The brand also announces a card capable of handling high RAM frequencies, with support for 9600 MT/s memory via XMP and EXPO profiles. The rest of the connectivity features two PCIe cards, the first x16 5.0 and the second x4 wired to the 4.0 standard. Storage is based on four SATA IIIs coupled with a trio of M.2s, one in PCIe 5.0 x4, the other two in PCIe 4.0 x4. At the rear, we find functional connectivity with five USB-A ports and one USB-C 3.2 Gen1. Two HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs are also present, as is 2.5 GbE Ethernet and audio. A version with WiFi 6E is also announced and, in any case, we find a good old PS2 port that some will appreciate as less resource-hungry. Now, it remains to be seen when the card will be available, ditto for the selling price.
Here’s the Gigabyte product sheet!
