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).
The Box and Goodies -Ever since the introduction of the P6x line up Gigabyte has been changing up their box designs. The X58A-OC comes in a glossy black box with an image that reminds me of a car engine. You will get to see this image a little later on when we take a look at the actual board itself. Gigabyte has left the box front very clean. There are a couple of logos telling you what this board supports (i.e. the X58 chipset and the Core i7 CPU). Other than that things are, well… clean. The back of the box, while more cluttered is still very clean for a high performance product. Still what we find is enough product information and images to get you to get interested in this product (That is if you are not already interested before you get the box).
The loot inside the box is extensive. It is certainly not what you would find in a more pedestrian offering. You do get the typical things like user manual, driver and utilities DVD, cables and a few stickers. On top of that you also get a pair of SLI/Crossfire bridges and also a Three-way SLI bridge. A very handy feature for those of you that are planning to really push the X58A-OC is a bag of voltage ready cables. These plug into a spot on the board (which we will show you in the next section) and allow you to directly read the voltage running through the various components on the X58A-OC.
