Gadgetory

now these days you'd be hard-pressed to find a gigabyte motherboard that is not advertised as overclockable and with overclocking features however the x58 a - OC 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 you've 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 land as well as audio but what it does have is a ground-up design not like ground up like your are like this but from the ground level up to the top design for overclocking so this is an X 58 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 don't forget that does include core i7 extreme 6 core processors on the back we will find a ton of different features and whatnots Meg gigabyte has to say now when they before this board was released actually it's the long-standing x58 tradition of overclocking had been turned on its here 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 motherboard 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 3-way SLI bridge because if you're an extreme overclockers it's gonna be using a board like this you probably will need one okay we've got 2 SATA six gigabit of rather bill run on SATA 6 gigabits per second but this is not there SATA 6 part number so to right-angles SATA cables to straight to SATA cables we have a rear i/o 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 voltage check readouts here so you can use these to use a multimeter to manually check the voltages to various parts of the system very important especially if you're doing any V modding gigabyte sticker for the front of your test bench in all likelihood because this won't go in a case we've got a gigabyte utility DVD as well as a user's manual though if you're buying this board you probably don't need to user's manual all right let's close this up and have a 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 a OC outstanding this is by far the best-looking board I've seen probably since I'd say since DF eyes socket 478 stuff because I love the orange and black Halloween 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 gonna use this in 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 features so I'll start with the CPU socket this is a load socket so you're not going to have any of those burn problems that were experienced with some of the Foxconn sockets that's that's just well it's a little thing you know do care and attention being paid to the target market for this board we have here so I'm gonna cheat I'm going to look at the backboard so gigabyte claims output from the CPU socket is up to 1200 watts now if you managed to make a CPU consume 12 hundred watts then you're some kind of wizard but the point is that this board is completely over built so they're using driver MOSFETs there's their chokes are rated if single chokes are rated up to 50 amps okay it's let me see okay the PWM frequency goes up to a 1000 Hertz 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 ending up on the board any more than is absolutely necessary okay so we've got support for dual 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 six say two to three gigabit per second ports and to say two three six gigabit 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 on/off charge so that means you can charge your devices even when the system is powered off they're claiming up to 40 percent faster as well which is frames there's your front audio okay and we don't see anything special in terms of the audio chips being used or the land the land chips being used it looks like just real tech chips so nothing special there as ice' mentioned before this is not for that this is for overclocking serious business so we have dual graphics support in 16 X 16 X mode or quad graphics support in 8 X 8 X 8 X 8 X mode so there are no additional chips that means no an F 200 chips no lucid hydrologic chips nothing like that this is in order to make sure that there's this little latency as possible it's yet to be proven in any meaningful way that those additional chips and they bandwidth they provide are able to improve benchmark scores 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 as for the power delivery system it's also LED lit so 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 be feeling 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 put a pot on the Northbridge itself so they've thoughtfully made the south bridge of 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 C Mo's 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 Hertz very easily up here all right all these buttons over here all have different functionalities so this is the OC gear so what that means is that the frequency up and frequency down buttons RI they're going to go up and down by one megahertz or 0.3 megahertz 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 gigahertz on the next boot this is pretty self-explanatory that's the CPU 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 our 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 yeah 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 vm CH core CPU PLL DDR v TT the vm bqbi v TT as well as the the core 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 being benchmarked we've also got a couple other 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 module modular cable up to my motherboard if I want to plug that auxilary power in it's 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 axillary power being provided by SATA so that's that's awesome love that okay let me just see if there's anything that I am missing here actually give me a sec two more things actually yeah so gigabyte it 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 don't have slots here and here allows you to very easily insulate in between the PCI Express graphic slots for the best sub-zero 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 bios switch so you can switch between bios one and two this allows you to save up to sixteen BIOS 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've got your stable settings no problem very cool feature don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos and thanks for checking out this video of the x58 AOC and one thing I didn't mention yet that I love matte black PCB so the product is therefore automatically made of win