14 DAY TRIAL // After releasing a long series of teaser pictures and scant pieces of information, Gigabyte has finally made official the X58A-OC motherboard that was designed in order to cater to the needs of extreme overclockers and hardware enthusiasts.
The board 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.
“The Gigabyte X58A-OC introduces some really exciting and unique overclocking technologies like the PWM frequency switcher, a full range of onboard hardware OC buttons, on-board SATA power connectors for stable multiple graphics configurations, and DualBIOS switcher that up until now have just been ideas discussed in private OC forums and messages,” commented HiCookie, Gigabyte's in-house overclocking expert.
The Gigabyte X58A-OC motherboard should go on sale in mid-March for around $280 USD in the United States.