14 DAY TRIAL // After more than two months have passed since Gigabyte officially announced the X58A-OC overclocking motherboard, the company has finally started shipping the board out of its Nanping, Taiwan factory and availability is expected in the next couple of weeks.
Gigabyte has designed the X58A-OC with the help of HiCookie, a renowned professional overclocker, and it is built especially for enthusiasts that don't require all the bells and whistles that are usually associated with top of the line LGA 1336 motherboards.
Instead, the company decided to go for raw performance and overclocking headroom, designing a board that likes to play nice with extreme cooling solutions, such as liquid nitrogen and dry ice.
As a result, its layout was optimized so that it would ease the insulation process and can deliver a whopping 1200W of power to the CPU socket via a “dual power” 12-phase VRM, that is accompanied by a 3-phase Uncore VRM and a 2-phase memory delivery circuitry.
Furthermore, the X58A-OC uses only POSCAP low-profile capacitors and the four PCI Express x16 slots installed are provided with additional juice via two SATA power connectors which are located near the edge of the motherboard.
A full range of overclocking buttons and dip-switches is available, so users can change the PWM frequency (from 600K to 1000K), BLCK stepping and CPU ratio in real-time.
These are accompanied by a voltage measurement module, a debug LCD, and by an on-board BIOS switcher.
The final version of the board hasn't changed all that much from the early samples that have been pictured previously, except for the northbridge heatsink that is now slightly lower.
According to a post on the Gigabyte Tech Daily blog published by Tim Handley, Deputy Marketing Manager for Gigabyte motherboards, the X58A-OC should be available in Taipei’s Kuang Hua computer market this evening, while the rest of the world should get it over the next 2-3 weeks.