Gigabyte X58A-OC
Published by Marc Büchel on 08.07.11Fazit
| Allgemein | + | - | |
| With the X58A-OC Gigabyte decided to explore an entirely new market. Unter the Lead of their engineer and possionate overclocker "Hi Cookie" they developed a board that defines a whole new product category for motherboards. Already from the layout and design persepective one can see that Gigabyte has created a board that has been built with only two purposes in mind: overclocking and what else, extreme overclocking. You'll for example find a 4G utton onboard which directly increases the clock of your CPU to 4 GHz. Furthermore one can see at this boards I/O panel that priorities have been set, because you'll only find a bunch of USB ports, a PS2 mouse connector, a PS2 keyboard connector, a enthernet port and three audio port, that's it. Not mucht but enough for overclocking. But the Features show only one part of this board. Since Gigabyte refurbished the Design of their high-end motherboard they haven't released one board that did not come with stunning looks. With the X58A-OC this is no different and its design is simply astonishing. The matte PCB and the orange accents make it look perfect. | -
Design - Layout - Numerous OC-Features |
||
| Layout | + | - | |
|
Generally the Gigabyte X58A-OCs layout is very well thought. Once more very practical are the angled SATA connectors as well as the power- and reset-buttons. Also the debug display can become very useful in case you should have issues with a component in your system or the board itself. If your thinking about a multi GPU setup you'll definitely like that there is plenty of space between the different PCI Express x16 slots which allows an adequate cooling of more than one GPU. Additionally Gigabyte put some more very nice overclocking features on this board. The option to in- or decrease the BCLK as well as the possibility to change the BCLK stepping comes in very hand when you do extreme overclocking. Naturally there also are measureing points onboard which allow you to read out different voltages. If this motherboard marks the beginning of a whole new product category we should all be very curious what awaits us in near and far future! |
- Angled SATA connectors
- Power/Reset-Button onboard - Debug display - Plenty of space between PCI Express x16 Slots for Multi-GPU-Setup |
||
| Performance | + | - | |
| The performance in general is on quite a low level. Compared to the other boards in our comparison tables the X58A-OC lacks behind. The worst thing for this board were the memory benchmarks in SiSoft Sandra. It really seems like the good overclocking capabilities come at a cost. Therefore it looks like it is related to the overall performance which slightly lacks behind the competition. | -
3D Benchmarks - 2D Benchmarks - Games |
||
| Overclocking | + | - | |
| This part of the review shows the other side of the medal. Definitely this is one hell of an overclocking board. In principal the 4G button for example is something very simple but it's very useful and handy to quickly set the clock to 4 GHz by the click of a button. Furhtermore the BIOS is very well structured and you'll quickly find all the settings you'd want to manipulate. Gigabyte doesn't use UEFI BIOS but nevertheless a lot of overclockers are familiar to this Award BIOS version. Regarding the BCLK we were able to reach 225 MHz. More wasn't possible with our CPU but were sure that the board itself is capable of much more. | -
BCLK 225+ MHz - V-Regulator - 4G Button - BCLK Buttons onboard |
||
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| If you should be looking the overclocking motherboard then the Gigabyte X58A-OC is going to be the right choice for you. There simply is no other board that offers that many overclocking features. | -
Overclocking |
- Office PC - Gaming-PC |
Discuss this article in the forums
Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch m.buechel@ocaholic.ch c.ney@ocaholic.ch
| Navigate through the articles | |
Gigabyte Z68X-UD7-B3 Review |
ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z - Layout and Design
 |
|
|