14 DAY TRIAL // As time goes by, Gigabyte seems to release ever more details about its upcoming overclocking oriented motherboard, dubbed X58A-OC, the company just publishing another teaser image, this time depicting the SATA ports as well as one particularly interesting innovation.
Traditionally, overclocking motherboards, that supported tree-way and four-way multi-GPU technologies such as CrossFireX and SLI, had to rely on Molex connectors for delivering the additional power required by the graphics cards installed.
However, said connectors were usually placed in hard to reach places, that made insulating the motherboard against condensation particularly tricky.
To overcome this problem, Gigabyte decided to move the GPU auxiliary power away from the center of the board and more towards its margins, on the X58A-OC the plugs being placed to the left and to the right of the SATA ports.
In addition, Gigabyte replaced the Molex plugs with present day SATA power connectors, making cable routing a lot more easy and flexible.
This innovation goes to add to what already seems like the perfect overclocking motherboard, for the X58A-OC Gigabyte deciding to drop any feature that isn't essential for overclocking under extreme cooling conditions.
As a result, the area around the CPU has been cleared of any protrusions to make it more dry ice and LN2 pot friendly, and the PCB has been painted matte black, so condensation is a lot easier to spot than on a light-colored board.
Feature wise, overclockers get the bare minimum, as the board packs only four PCI Express x16 slots, a regular PCI slot, dual SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports, a pair of regular USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet network connectivity, three audio jacks and two PS/2 ports.
As you can see from the picture, storage is provided by eight SATA ports, two of them featuring SATA 6Gbps connectivity.
More pictures are slated to arrive soon, or so says Gigabyte's Tech Daily blog.
