The perfect LGA 1366 motherboard for hardcore overclockers

Sep 9, 2011 10:11 GMT  ·  By

Launched in the first half of this year, Gigabyte's X58A-OC motherboard designed especially for hardcore overclockers is now available for just $249 on Newegg, making it a full $50 cheaper than the original MSRP.

The offer is available for a limited time only and the $50 discount is available through a mail-in rebate card.

For those of you that don't remember Gigabyte's board, this is based on the X58 chipset and support a wide range on LGA 1366 processors, including Intel's flagship Core i7 990X Extreme Edition CPU.

The X58A-OC was designed with the help of HiCookie, a renowned professional overclocker, and is built especially for enthusiasts that don't require all the bells and whistles that are usually associated with top of the line motherboards.

Instead, Gigabyte 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 at the edge of the motherboard.

A full range of overclocking buttons and dip-switches is also 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.

Gigabyte's GA-X58A-OC was first introduced back in May and, as expected, has become well known for its high overclocking potential.