now these days you'd be hard pressed to find a Gigabyte motherboard that is not
advertised as overclockable and uh with
overclocking features however the x58
A- is the first board they've released that is pretty much strictly for
overclocking so they have their gamer series which is the G1 Series so we got
the Assassin the sniper and the gorilla and then this is the OC Series so it
might not have some of the features that Gamers might like such as you know the
third party chips for uh Lan as well as
audio but what it does have is a ground
up design not like ground up like like
this but from the ground level up to the top design for overclocking so this is
an x58 board which means it supports Intel Core i7 processors on LGA
1366 here we will find okay little OC
Shield not much on that side not much over here uh don't forget that does
include core i7 Extreme 6 core processors on the back we will find a
ton of different features and whatnot
that Gigabyte has to say now when they before this board was released actually
the longstanding x58 tradition of
overclocking had been turned on its ear because they were able to achieve a
previously unheard of that is a world record overclock on this board in spite
of the fact that this platform has been around since pretty much forever it's
been like a couple years now so there's been a lot of time for overclockers and
the engineers at the mother board companies to get familiar with the
platform and even so Gigabyte has managed to release a board that
outperformed everything else when we're talking strictly overclocking so here we
have a crossfire Bridge here we have an SLI Bridge here we have a three-way SLI
Bridge because if you're an extreme overclocker who's going to be using a board like this you probably will need
one okay we've got uh two SATA 6 GB
rather they'll run on SATA 6 GB per second but this is not their SATA 6 part
number so two right angle SATA cables two straight SATA cables we have a rear
IO shield now check that out there's almost no stuff coming out of the back
of the board because this is a in some ways a Bare Bones board that is designed
as I said for one purpose only you've got uh voltage check readouts here so
you can use these to uh use a Multimeter to manually check the voltages to
various parts of the system very important especially if you're doing any Ving Gigabyte sticker for the front of
your test bench in all likelihood because this won't go in a case uh we've
got a Gigabyte uh utility DVD as well as
a user manual although if you're buying this board you probably don't need a
user's manual all right let's close this up and have a look look at the board
itself now it's been quite a while since I've seen a board with as
appealing an aesthetic scheme as the x58
AOC outstanding this is by far the best
looking board I've seen probably since
um I'd say since DFI uh socket 478 stuff cuz I love the
orange and black Hall color scheme it's it's really easy to find UV orange stuff
to go with it whether it's fans or water cooling or whatever the case may be so
if you were going to use this in a in like a real daily driver Machine versus
just strictly for overclocking competition it would look so cool okay
so anyway I'm done gushing now so let's go ahead and have a look at the overall
layout of the board and then we'll talk about some of the special featur so let's start with the CPU socket this is
a Loz socket so you're not going to have any of those burn problems that we're
exper with some of the foxcon sockets that's uh just it's a little thing you
know due care and attention being paid to the target market for this board we
have here actually I'm going to cheat I'm going to look at the backboard so
Gigabyte claims output from the CPU
socket is up to 1 1200 watts now if you managed to make a CPU consume 1 12200
Watts then you're some kind of wizard but the point is that this board is
completely overbuilt so they're using driver mosfets um their their chokes are
rated single chokes are rated up to 50 amps okay it's
um let me see okay the pwm frequency
goes up to 1,000 htz excellent you've
got two 8 Pin EPS power connectors okay
so these are up here and their ideal location along the top left edge of the
board and actually give me one moment here also of note is the fact that the
CPU socket area is extremely clutter-free so this makes insulating
around the CPU much easier when you're using liquid nitrogen or dry ice cooling
or any other exotic cooling methods to cool the CPU itself because you don't
want that condensation uh ending up on the board any more than is absolutely
necessary Okay so we've got uh support for dual uh triple Channel DDR3 memory
you can see all those slots here I'm actually going to get into what all of this area is for a little bit later but
we've got our 24 pin ATX power connector exactly where it belongs along the right
hand Edge we have here we go uh six SATA
2 3 GB per second ports and two SATA 3 6
GB per second ports and I'll get into what these are for in a little bit as
well we have all of our front panel connectors here we have our front USB
including onoff charge so that means you can charge your devices even when the
system is powered off they're claiming up to 40% faster as well which is very
nice there's your front audio okay um we
don't see any anything special in terms of the audio chips being used or the Lan
uh the Lan chips being used it looks like just real Tech chips so nothing
special there as I mentioned before this is not for that this is for overclocking
serious business so we have uh dual uh
Graphics support in 16x 16x mode or quad
graphics support in 8X 8X 8X 8X mode so
there are no additional chips that means no uh nf200 chips no Lucid Hydro Logics
chips nothing like that this is in order to make sure that there's as little
latency as possible it's yet to be proven in any meaningful way that those
additional chips and the bandwidth they provide are able to improve Benchmark
score so that's why they have opted to not include those on this board we have
one PCI slot so if you need one you have
one and then moving right along we have an extremely beefy cooling solution for
the North Bridge as well well as for the power delivery system it's also LED lit
so uh you can see the power cables here and here so these strips right here are
actually going to light up and this one right here actually lights up so the
board should look really cool when it's powered on but that's just an aesthetic
thing so what I'm talking about here is just the fact that these have very very
beefy Alum aluminum heat sinks it's going to give you a lot of room for heat dissipation although some of the more
extreme overclockers may even just remove the whole whack and uh put a pot
on the North Bridge itself so they've thoughtfully made the South Bridge and
North Bridge heat sinks completely separate they haven't connected them via a heat pipe in order to make that
possible all right so let's talk about this neighborhood up actually no let's
talk about this first so here we've got um SOS clear switch as well as a BIOS
selector switch actually hold on is that the bio selector switch I might be a
little bit confused okay give me a sec sorry guys this is the pwm frequency
switch so you can go from 600 to 800 to 1,000 Herz very easily up here all right
all these buttons over here all have different functionality so this is the
OC gear so what that means is that the
frequency up and frequency down buttons are either going to go up and down by 1
mahz or 3 MHz so if you change the gear
it changes how fine the control you have over the base clock is this button right
here is just a one button overclock so it just sets the CPU to 4 GHz on the
next boot this is pretty self-explanatory that's the CPO ratio up
or down with the Press of a button so there is no delay this is just a plain
and simple Hardware adjusting button
awesome we've got a power switch as well as a reset switch and here are all our
voltage measurements so you can use the little plugs that came with it here I'll
show you guys that again so you can see how they go in yep here you go
and then the other ends of these are compatible with your multimeter so you
can use the leads on there to check the voltages to a variety of things so you
can check the qpi PLL vmch core CPU PLL
DDR VT the vdm V qpi VT as well as the
vcore so that's all of your critical ones right there we've also got an LED
post indicator so that'll help with any troubleshooting that you may have to do
with this board while it's uh being benchmarked we've also got a couple
things here so this is smart right here two SATA power connectors now what are
those for I am so sick of seeing auxiliary power connectors on
motherboards that are Molex because I
don't know about you guys but I actually don't have anything that plugs in in my
system anymore via Molex except my water cooling pump my water cooling pump is
nowhere near my motherboard so what that means is that I have to run a completely
separate mod modular cable up to my motherboard if I want to plug that
auxiliary power in stupid this is smart this is SATA power
connectors near SATA data connectors so
what that means is wherever you're running these is probably reasonably
close probably near the front of your case which is where most cases Mount the
hard drives to where you're already running SATA power so you run an
additional cable or you run a cable to a drive and then the other two harnesses
over to here great now you've got your auxiliary power being provided by SATA
so that's uh that's awesome love that okay let me just see if there there's
anything that I am missing
here actually give me a sec uh two more things actually yeah so
uh Gigabyte actually says that you can and by that I guess they mean they
recommend you use two different rails on your power supply for these so that way
you're not going to run into any limitations in terms of how much power
you can provide to the PCI Express slots the other thing is that they have
specifically designed the PCI Express slots with all low profile components in
between them also the spacing where they don't have slots here and here allows
you to very easily insulate in between the PCI Express Graphics slots for the
best Subzero performance and the most safety because you don't want to ruin
those expensive and sometimes heavily modified graphics cards it's a real pain
to redo all of that work last but not least here is the bio switch so you can
switch between uh BIOS one and two this allows you to save up to 16 bi profiles
it also allows you to control and there's a little LED indicator to show
you which one you're using on there but it allows you to control which BIOS you
are using and you can even okay you can switch and you can Flash to a new beta
BIOS find out if that works better for you turns out it doesn't great switch
back to your old BIOS you got your stable settings no problem very cool
feature don't forget to subscribe to lus techtips for more unboxings reviews and
other computer videos and thanks for checking out this video of the x58a OC
and one thing I didn't mention yet that I love matte black PCB so the product is
therefore automatically made of win