Gigabyte X58A-OC Overclocking Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
2,268 words · ~11 min read
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now these days you'd be hard pressed to find a Gigabyte motherboard that is not
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advertised as overclockable and uh with
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overclocking features however the x58
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A- is the first board they've released that is pretty much strictly for
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overclocking so they have their gamer series which is the G1 Series so we got
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the Assassin the sniper and the gorilla and then this is the OC Series so it
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might not have some of the features that Gamers might like such as you know the
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third party chips for uh Lan as well as
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audio but what it does have is a ground
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up design not like ground up like like
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this but from the ground level up to the top design for overclocking so this is
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an x58 board which means it supports Intel Core i7 processors on LGA
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1366 here we will find okay little OC
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Shield not much on that side not much over here uh don't forget that does
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include core i7 Extreme 6 core processors on the back we will find a
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ton of different features and whatnot
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that Gigabyte has to say now when they before this board was released actually
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the longstanding x58 tradition of
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overclocking had been turned on its ear because they were able to achieve a
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previously unheard of that is a world record overclock on this board in spite
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of the fact that this platform has been around since pretty much forever it's
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been like a couple years now so there's been a lot of time for overclockers and
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the engineers at the mother board companies to get familiar with the
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platform and even so Gigabyte has managed to release a board that
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outperformed everything else when we're talking strictly overclocking so here we
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have a crossfire Bridge here we have an SLI Bridge here we have a three-way SLI
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Bridge because if you're an extreme overclocker who's going to be using a board like this you probably will need
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one okay we've got uh two SATA 6 GB
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rather they'll run on SATA 6 GB per second but this is not their SATA 6 part
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number so two right angle SATA cables two straight SATA cables we have a rear
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IO shield now check that out there's almost no stuff coming out of the back
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of the board because this is a in some ways a Bare Bones board that is designed
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as I said for one purpose only you've got uh voltage check readouts here so
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you can use these to uh use a Multimeter to manually check the voltages to
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various parts of the system very important especially if you're doing any Ving Gigabyte sticker for the front of
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your test bench in all likelihood because this won't go in a case uh we've
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got a Gigabyte uh utility DVD as well as
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a user manual although if you're buying this board you probably don't need a
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user's manual all right let's close this up and have a look look at the board
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itself now it's been quite a while since I've seen a board with as
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appealing an aesthetic scheme as the x58
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AOC outstanding this is by far the best
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looking board I've seen probably since
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um I'd say since DFI uh socket 478 stuff cuz I love the
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orange and black Hall color scheme it's it's really easy to find UV orange stuff
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to go with it whether it's fans or water cooling or whatever the case may be so
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if you were going to use this in a in like a real daily driver Machine versus
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just strictly for overclocking competition it would look so cool okay
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so anyway I'm done gushing now so let's go ahead and have a look at the overall
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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
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a Loz socket so you're not going to have any of those burn problems that we're
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exper with some of the foxcon sockets that's uh just it's a little thing you
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know due care and attention being paid to the target market for this board we
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have here actually I'm going to cheat I'm going to look at the backboard so
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Gigabyte claims output from the CPU
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socket is up to 1 1200 watts now if you managed to make a CPU consume 1 12200
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Watts then you're some kind of wizard but the point is that this board is
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completely overbuilt so they're using driver mosfets um their their chokes are
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rated single chokes are rated up to 50 amps okay it's
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um let me see okay the pwm frequency
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goes up to 1,000 htz excellent you've
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got two 8 Pin EPS power connectors okay
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so these are up here and their ideal location along the top left edge of the
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board and actually give me one moment here also of note is the fact that the
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CPU socket area is extremely clutter-free so this makes insulating
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around the CPU much easier when you're using liquid nitrogen or dry ice cooling
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or any other exotic cooling methods to cool the CPU itself because you don't
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want that condensation uh ending up on the board any more than is absolutely
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necessary Okay so we've got uh support for dual uh triple Channel DDR3 memory
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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
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we've got our 24 pin ATX power connector exactly where it belongs along the right
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hand Edge we have here we go uh six SATA
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2 3 GB per second ports and two SATA 3 6
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GB per second ports and I'll get into what these are for in a little bit as
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well we have all of our front panel connectors here we have our front USB
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including onoff charge so that means you can charge your devices even when the
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system is powered off they're claiming up to 40% faster as well which is very
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nice there's your front audio okay um we
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don't see any anything special in terms of the audio chips being used or the Lan
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uh the Lan chips being used it looks like just real Tech chips so nothing
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special there as I mentioned before this is not for that this is for overclocking
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serious business so we have uh dual uh
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Graphics support in 16x 16x mode or quad
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graphics support in 8X 8X 8X 8X mode so
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there are no additional chips that means no uh nf200 chips no Lucid Hydro Logics
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chips nothing like that this is in order to make sure that there's as little
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latency as possible it's yet to be proven in any meaningful way that those
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additional chips and the bandwidth they provide are able to improve Benchmark
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score so that's why they have opted to not include those on this board we have
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one PCI slot so if you need one you have
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one and then moving right along we have an extremely beefy cooling solution for
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the North Bridge as well well as for the power delivery system it's also LED lit
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so uh you can see the power cables here and here so these strips right here are
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actually going to light up and this one right here actually lights up so the
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board should look really cool when it's powered on but that's just an aesthetic
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thing so what I'm talking about here is just the fact that these have very very
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beefy Alum aluminum heat sinks it's going to give you a lot of room for heat dissipation although some of the more
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extreme overclockers may even just remove the whole whack and uh put a pot
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on the North Bridge itself so they've thoughtfully made the South Bridge and
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North Bridge heat sinks completely separate they haven't connected them via a heat pipe in order to make that
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possible all right so let's talk about this neighborhood up actually no let's
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talk about this first so here we've got um SOS clear switch as well as a BIOS
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selector switch actually hold on is that the bio selector switch I might be a
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little bit confused okay give me a sec sorry guys this is the pwm frequency
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switch so you can go from 600 to 800 to 1,000 Herz very easily up here all right
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all these buttons over here all have different functionality so this is the
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OC gear so what that means is that the
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frequency up and frequency down buttons are either going to go up and down by 1
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mahz or 3 MHz so if you change the gear
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it changes how fine the control you have over the base clock is this button right
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here is just a one button overclock so it just sets the CPU to 4 GHz on the
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next boot this is pretty self-explanatory that's the CPO ratio up
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or down with the Press of a button so there is no delay this is just a plain
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and simple Hardware adjusting button
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awesome we've got a power switch as well as a reset switch and here are all our
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voltage measurements so you can use the little plugs that came with it here I'll
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show you guys that again so you can see how they go in yep here you go
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and then the other ends of these are compatible with your multimeter so you
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can use the leads on there to check the voltages to a variety of things so you
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can check the qpi PLL vmch core CPU PLL
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DDR VT the vdm V qpi VT as well as the
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vcore so that's all of your critical ones right there we've also got an LED
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post indicator so that'll help with any troubleshooting that you may have to do
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with this board while it's uh being benchmarked we've also got a couple
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things here so this is smart right here two SATA power connectors now what are
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those for I am so sick of seeing auxiliary power connectors on
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motherboards that are Molex because I
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don't know about you guys but I actually don't have anything that plugs in in my
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system anymore via Molex except my water cooling pump my water cooling pump is
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nowhere near my motherboard so what that means is that I have to run a completely
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separate mod modular cable up to my motherboard if I want to plug that
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auxiliary power in stupid this is smart this is SATA power
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connectors near SATA data connectors so
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what that means is wherever you're running these is probably reasonably
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close probably near the front of your case which is where most cases Mount the
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hard drives to where you're already running SATA power so you run an
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additional cable or you run a cable to a drive and then the other two harnesses
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over to here great now you've got your auxiliary power being provided by SATA
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so that's uh that's awesome love that okay let me just see if there there's
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anything that I am missing
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here actually give me a sec uh two more things actually yeah so
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uh Gigabyte actually says that you can and by that I guess they mean they
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recommend you use two different rails on your power supply for these so that way
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you're not going to run into any limitations in terms of how much power
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you can provide to the PCI Express slots the other thing is that they have
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specifically designed the PCI Express slots with all low profile components in
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between them also the spacing where they don't have slots here and here allows
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you to very easily insulate in between the PCI Express Graphics slots for the
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best Subzero performance and the most safety because you don't want to ruin
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those expensive and sometimes heavily modified graphics cards it's a real pain
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to redo all of that work last but not least here is the bio switch so you can
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switch between uh BIOS one and two this allows you to save up to 16 bi profiles
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it also allows you to control and there's a little LED indicator to show
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you which one you're using on there but it allows you to control which BIOS you
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are using and you can even okay you can switch and you can Flash to a new beta
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BIOS find out if that works better for you turns out it doesn't great switch
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back to your old BIOS you got your stable settings no problem very cool
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feature don't forget to subscribe to lus techtips for more unboxings reviews and
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other computer videos and thanks for checking out this video of the x58a OC
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and one thing I didn't mention yet that I love matte black PCB so the product is
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therefore automatically made of win