14 DAY TRIAL // Gigabyte has been teasing the overclocking community with partial pictures of the GA-X58A-OC motherboard for quite some time now, so many will rejoice when hearing that the Taiwanese-company has finally decided to release a set of images depicting the whole board, together with some details regarding its features and specifications.
The GA-X58A-OC was designed with overclocking in mind and it targets enthusiasts who bench using extreme cooling solutions such as liquid nitrogen and dry ice.
This means that the board has been cleared of any protuberance that would obstruct its insulation, Gigabyte also opting for dual 8-pin CPU power connectors which can input up to 720A.
The PWM frequency can be adjusted to 300KHz, 600KHz and 800KHz and the processor VRM uses a 12-phase “dual power” design which can deliver a maximum of 600A to the CPU.
In addition, the board also features a 3-phase Uncore VRM and a 2-phase memory delivery circuitry.
For the GA-X58A-OC, Gigabyte has decided to use only POSCAP tantalum capacitors which are not only highly reliable, but also save some extra space.
Right beneath the six memory slots, the motherboard packs a BIOS debug LCD, voltage measurement point for various chipset, DRAM and CPU settings as well as a slew of on-board switches.
Most of these are self-explanatory, except for the newly introduced Gear button which adjusts the step of the BCLK clock back and forth between 0.3MHz and 1MHz.
To the left and to the right of the eight SATA ports, we find two power connectors which are used to deliver additional power to the PCI Express slots when running multiple graphics cards in AMD CrossFireX or NVIDIA SLI.
Speaking of multi-GPU configurations, Gigabyte's motherboard provides a total of 48 PCI Express lanes split into dual PCIe x16 and two PCI Express x8 ports.
Other features include built-in orange LED lighting for IOH and ICH heatsinks, seven 4-pin fan headers, as well as two BIOS chips which can store up to 8 profiles each.
On the back of the board we find a pair of legacy PS/2 ports, Gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, and three audio connectors for 5.1-channel surround sound. (via VR-Zone)
