Taiwan's leading computer magazine, Computer DIY has tested the Gigabyte GA-X58A-OC motherboard, bringing insights regarding the appearance, innovative features, performance and overclocking performance of the board, concluding that the GA-X58A-OC motherboard offers leading overclocking performance making it the perfect choice for hardcore overclockers and gamers alike.
Regarding design, the Computer DIY reviewer said:
Expressing itself straight away as an ultra-running, dominant force of nature, the X58A-OC board uses a deeply contrasting Orange and Black color design which immediately reveals it’s intentions. Welcome to the OC series!
On the subject of materials including capacitors, chokes, ferrite cores and the board’s 12 + 3 phase design: 
The whole PCB board is full of solid-state capacitors, all of them high-quality capacitors that provide the best stability and current delivery with minimal leakage or waste. These capacitors can stand high temperatures and offer fast heat dissipation. This makes them ideal in extreme gaming or overclocking situations. The processor power module also uses 12 + 3-phases, and includes high-quality ferrite core chokes which also offer better heat efficiency and extended board longevity.
Regarding the innovative connectivity options:
The Gigabyte X58-OC offers two PCI-e 2.0 x16 and two PCI-e 2.0 x8, ... and support for CrossFire X and SLI configurations up to 4-way. Usually high-end motherboards supporting up to 4 graphics cards will provide the extra PCIe power supply via large 4Pin connectors The X58-OC instead offers a unique design with a SATA connector next to the two SATA data sockets which be additionally installed to provide additional power from the power supply to the graphics array. This is a more efficient use of SATA power connectors, of which there are usually plenty. This makes the VGA array much more stable in multi-GPU configurations.
Overclocking as you’d expect was a subject covered in detail:
Smart overclocking, also proved to be quite exciting! You can find 4G, Power and Gear buttons in the corner of the board
... press the button to 4G, from system boot the CPU will be configured to reach a 4GHz clock frequency. This as you can appreciate, is a key feature for easy overclocking, even if it is a somewhat conservative approach to true overclocking. The ‘Gear’ overclocking buttons are designed to let the user implement small overclocks at increments of 1MHz or 0.3MHz, so that step by step, you can slowly increase the processor clock. The user can also change the FSB and multiplier settings by adjusting the relative + and – buttons. ... users have never known BIOS setting that can be implemented for overclocking so easily, Oh!
Finally, the Computer DIY editor made the following conclusions:
Orange black color is in full contrast with a strong flavor of ultra-running, capacitor design, but similar to the G1-Killer series boards this GIGABYTE OC motherboard also uses the high-end Intel X58 chipset which is still the performance master in today’s PC market. It is also easy to overclock this motherboard, so the launch of the GIGABYTE X58-OC with the help of well-known overclockers like HiCookie who jointly developed the product, designed to build the ultimate extreme performance platform!
You can learn more about Gigabyte X58A-OC motherboard, here.
Computer DIY magazine can be found here.
This article was translated from Chinese. You can find the original Chinese version (中文版) here.
0 comments: