GIGABYTE’s X58A-OC: The Hardcore Overclocker’s Motherboard

When most people look to purchase a motherboard, there are a couple of considerations that might come to mind. Features, features, and more features. Believe it or not, though, for hardcore overclockers, it might be a lot of these features that prove problematic in overclocking, and it’s for that reason that many like to use boards that are scaled down in order to make the most of the components that matter, such as the CPU or GPU.

Taking all of that into consideration, GIGABYTE, with the help of its in-house overclocker HiCookie, developed the X58A-OC, touted as the world’s first true overclocking board. While certainly not the “first” overclocking motherboard in general, the X58A-OC does a lot of interesting things, setting it apart from the crowd.

The most notable difference between this board and others is that there isn’t a plethora of ports on the back. Rather, there are a total of four USB (two are 3.0), audio, LAN and also PS/2 ports. The inclusion of both a keyboard and mouse PS/2 port is interesting, because in talking to many overclockers over the years, many prefer to stay away from using USB ports during hardcore overlcocking due to their power draw, despite being rather small.

Other considerations have also been taken, such as implementing high-quality POScaps and Max Power Ferrite Core chokes. For improved insulation, LN2 users will be happy to see properly spaced PCI Express slots that will allow putty to be added with ease, rather than have a small area where it risks getting into the slot itself.

No overclocking motherboard would be complete without dials and buttons right on the board itself. For starters, there’s a button that will automatically overclock the CPU to 4GHz on the next boot, but there are also buttons to incrementally increase the BCLK, CPU ratio and even fine-tune the increase, from 0.3MHz to 1MHz. Beside these buttons are leads for multi-meter use, so that overclockers can make sure voltage levels are in check.

GIGABYTE for some reason doesn’t even have this board listed on its website, so we have nothing to link to, but for those interested in reading through the full press release, I’ve uploaded it here.