Overclocking is a big deal these days. I can remember when it was just a bunch of crazed guys with too much money and free time on their hands. We used to do things like solder new resistors onto CPUs (the Slot A Athlons), swap out caps and resistors on motherboards to get more voltage through the boards and to the CPU. I vividly remember building water cooling kits with pool pumps and tubing bought from Home Depot. Once I even pulled a radiator from a Coke vending machine (old and broken) for a rig I was building. Well thankfully those days are over (but it would still be fun to do some of this). Motherboard makers are now designing and building motherboards with top of the line components voltage regulation systems and tracing that is laid out for business. Many have world class overclockers that work for them to get the most performance out of each and every motherboard. Every now and then they get to build something special from the ground up. We are taking a look at one of these boards that has been built for speed. The one we have in-house was designed by HiCookie; the resident overclocker at Gigabyte. This is the X58A-OC (the OC is for Overclocking as if you could not guess).
BIOS -BIOS is an acronym that stands for Basic Input/Output System. It is meant to control your product at a very low level. As of right now there are three regularly used BIOS formats (there are actually more than that but there are three common ones). These are the AMI (American Megatrends Incorporated), Award, and Phoenix.
Gigabyte has always leaded towards the Award BIOS layout and the X58A-OC is no different. We can see the typical Gigabyte layout in the image above. The place that we want to kick things off in is the M.I.T (MB Intelligent Tweaker) page. Once inside you find that Gigabyte has broken things down into smaller one page sections. There is a current status page, an Advanced Frequency Settings page, and more. Each one breaks the overclocking settings into easy to read pages. One thing that I have always been frustrated with is having to arrow up and down through long pages to check all my settings (to make sure I didn’t forget one). There are still some sub menus to go through; especially in the Advanced Memory Settings page.
Of course there are other places in the BIOS that are important; but let’s be honest you are not going to spend much time there. They are ancillary to why you are going into the BIOS in the first place.
Overclocking -The X58A-OC, as we have said more than once, is an overclocking motherboard. It was designed by HiCookie and stripped down to the bare minimum (with the exception of USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0) to keep things uncomplicated. With that said, we were not able to get as high of an overclock as we expected. We were hoping to break our old record of just over 4.5GHz stable but hit the stability wall at 175MHz BCLK and a 25x Ratio. This got us just under 4.4GHz. If I were to make a guess I would say that I BIOS update with some tweaks to the memory subsystem will fix this. We also want to reproach the overclocking on the X58A-OC when we get our hands on some more advanced cooling. 4.375GHz is not all that bad, but really we wanted more.
Of course overclocking is a picky subject. I can buy to identical CPUs from the store and they will not always perform the same way under stress. This is the same with motherboards, RAM and GPUs. So again it is important to keep in mind that our results represent a specific hardware configuration. Yours may be similar but will rarely be identical.Overclocking Tools -Gigabyte’s tools of choice is EasyTune6. This is a suite of tools that are combined in a single UI. I have to say that in my opinion the UI is a little boring and there are pages that get in the way of what it is intended to do. However, this does not take away from the functionality or the performance; this is just a personal thing. The first two pages get you the same information as you find get from CPUz. It is not until the third page (well really the first page when you open the application) that you get into the real workings of EasyTune6.
The third page in is the Tuner Page. You start off on the Quick Boost page. Here you have three options for a one stop overclock. The first two are probably places that you won’t want to go if you bought this board and the third; well that is just a pit stop on the way to higher speeds.
For the people that really bought this board for what it is intended you will want to skip over the “easy” button and head right on into the advanced settings pages. Here you can really do some damage. You have access to the BCLK, Memory, and PCIe frequencies. You also get to play with the Ratios, and a ton of voltage options. Like I said you can do some damage here. Just a note, if you change the memory speed you will need to reboot.
The next three tabs let you OC the GPU (well most of them), setup and work with the Smart Fan settings, and monitor the temperatures and voltages. I have honestly never used the GPU overclocking function but I have tinkered with the smart fans and the H/W monitor.
