Our second Overclockers UK bundle represents a higher grade of components and features at, obviously, a higher price than the previous one. But what you get for your money makes this particular bundle stand out from the crowd.
The Overclockers UK Gigabyte Magma bundle consists of a Gigabyte Z97X-SOC Force motherboard, a choice of 8GB or 16GB TeamGroup Vulcan 2133MHz memory, an Intel Core i7-4790K Haswell Refresh CPU overclocked to 4.5GHz and a Prolimatech Genesis CPU cooler.
Starting with the motherboard, the Gigabyte Z97X-SOC Force is a singularly impressive overclocking enhanced board. It has four DDR3 DIMM slots for a maximum of 32GB, 3300MHz overclocked memory, two shared bandwidth PCIe x16 slots (dropping to x8 when both slots are occupied), two PCIe x4, a single PCIe x1 and two PCI slots. The rear IO has four USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0 ports, optical S/PDIF, VGA, HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort, one PS/2 port, six audio jacks and gigabit Ethernet.
Aside from the orangeon-black colouring of the motherboard, there’s another element that stands out from the usual here in the form of a row of buttons located under the memory slots. The buttons are inherited from the more extreme overclocking motherboards that tend to cater for those who use liquid nitrogen in great abundance. To give us mere mortals a taste of what the extreme users get up to and because the extreme overclocking motherboards don’t sell as many as regular motherboards, Gigabyte has thrown in this extra feature.
The buttons offer the user a range of features, from providing power to the motherboard and connected components for testing outlandish cooling solutions or demonstrations, through to clearing the CMOS, onebutton overclocking, disabling PCIe slots and other such adjustments. It’s an overclocker’s and system tweaker’s dreams come truem and along with higher grade capacitors and other military class PCB features, there’s a lot to get your teeth into with this board.
Memory in this bundle comes as a choice of two options. Here you can opt for 8GB of TeamGroup Vulcan 2400MHz RAM or for £39 more you can opt for 16GB of TeamGroup Vulcan 2133MHz RAM. Both options are orange dual stick kits, which match the orange on the Gigabyte Z97X-SOC nicely, and both are more than enough to cope with anything you can throw at them.
The final component in the bundle is the Prolimatech Genesis CPU cooler, another example of the overclocking fraternity this package is targeted for. The Genesis is an L-shaped design cooler that allows three 120mm or 140mm fans to be attached on the exposed surfaces. It has six copper heatpipes running through the aluminium fans and weighs a considerable 800g.
The Genesis does have a high clearance, but you’ll still need to make sure other components beyond what you get in this bundle will fit when you come to putting them into a case. In addition to the Genesis, you also get a pair of LED 120mm BitFenix fans, which naturally enhance the orange/black, extreme overclocking and gaming theme.
There’s a reason why this bundle has ‘Enthusiast’ in the subtitle. It’s not for those who simply want to play a spot of Minecraft every so often. Obviously, it’s up to you whether you use the bundle for its overclocking options and features, but spending £575.99 to just leave everything running out of the box seems a bit of a waste.
This is an impressive bundle, designed for overclockers, system designers, enthusiast gamers and benchmarkers. It's expensive, but also rather well put together.