14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this week we brought you a short preview of Gigabyte's X58A-OC motherboard, and now we can offer you a much more in-depth look at the company’s upcoming X58 solution as a hardware review website managed to capture Gigabyte's latest creation on video.
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.
Hardware review website TweakTown managed to get an in-depth look at the board during a visit to Gigabyte's Taipei headquarters.
As we explained before, the board includes five important overclocking features: OC-VRM, OC-Touch, OC-PEG, OC-Cool and OC-Dual BIOS.
All of these are described in detail in the enclosed video, but it is important to note that the board is capable of providing the CPU with as much as 600A of current thanks to the 12-phase “dual power” design of the VRM.
In addition, the board also features a 3-phase Uncore VRM and a 2-phase memory delivery circuitry.
To ease the board insulation process, Gigabyte has decided to use only POSCAP tantalum capacitors on the X58A-OC, which provide additional space around the processor socket, and repositioned all the power connectors out of the way.
Furthermore, the motherboard uses an all-black printed circuit board (PCB) which makes it easier for overclockers to spot condensation.
Other features include PWM adjustable frequencies, voltage measurement points, for various chipset, DRAM and CPU settings, on-board BCLK clock adjusting buttons as well as dual BIOS chips.
The Gigabyte X58A-OC motherboard should go on sale in mid-March for around $280 USD in the United States.